Kandor
by a-delacroix
Summary: Added Chapter 5 which introduces a new protagonist, Lena Luthor, the teenaged daughter of Lana Lang and the 'Zod possessed' Lex Luthor from the Smallville Season 5 finale. Note: This story is set in the year 2020.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Well, I own a house, two cars, a pair of jetskis, and a lot of other junk, but none of these characters.

Author's Note: This story is set after the Smallville TV series and after Superman movies 1 & 2.

Kandor

Chapter 1

Dawn arrived just as Kal passed into Kansas for the first time in over five years. The brilliant yellow light seemed to fill him with strength and power. It felt good to once more experience the full extent of his powers. Oh, most of his powers had returned with his arrival in the solar system, but basking in the sunlight filtered through the earth's atmosphere seemed to amplify everything.

Many times during the long voyage back he had wondered if returning was the right decision. But now, smelling the unique aroma of Kansas farmland, everything felt right. Feeling a need to be closer to the earth, he dropped to the ground ten miles short of Smallville and ran the rest of the way to the farm where he had spent most of his first twenty years.

As he neared the Kent homestead, more and more familiar landmarks came into view. First was the Ross family farm. The old country house looked much the same, but the surrounding fields were filled with sorghum rather than the corn he always remembered. No way would these short plants have hidden his tiny first spaceship the way the corn had done in its day. And then for a moment Pete's typically smiling face flashed through his mind. Briefly he wondered where Pete was these days. But then he remembered it was not simply the five years he had been gone that separated them. No, things had never been the same since their junior year of high school and they hadn't crossed paths since way back in college.

But there were more important things to think about today than long-lost friends. As Kal continued down the road he next passed the old Luthor mansion. It definitely had seen better days with graffiti scrawled on its perimeter walls, the front gate hanging all askew, and many of the windows either broken or boarded up. Obviously no one had been in residence for many years. As he passed the side entrance to the extensive garage where he had spent so many hours with Lex in his youth, Kal wondered if Lex's condition had ever improved or if he was still confined to the prison psychiatric ward.

Quickly he left the decrepit mansion behind and passed through more farmland with fields filled with sorghum and wheat. Where was all of the corn? In its day, before the arrival of the meteors, this had once been the unofficial corn capitol of the Midwest. So where was all of the corn, he wondered. Finally, after running almost eight miles, he came across a field, but it sported the first giant irrigation machine he had ever seen east of the Arkansas River. He had spent enough years while growing up helping his Dad around the farm and had attended enough 4-H seminars to realize what he was seeing was the response to a significant climate change. Had global warming had that much impact during the mere five years he had been gone?

However as the familiar 'Kent Farm' sign became visible in the distance, all thoughts of agriculture and climates faded to the back of his mind. And then they were completely forgotten as the yellow farmhouse came into view. Involuntarily he felt his body slowing as his gaze swept over the red barn with its loft where he had spent so much of his youth, the rusted old wood-chipper where he had first shown his father the extent of his invulnerability, the tall blue corn dryer where his mom had almost suffocated, and all the rest of the memory-filled buildings and farm implements. Sweeping his gaze across everything once again as he slowed to a jog, it all looked so old and worn compared to his memories. Had it always been like this, but he just hadn't noticed? Or was the farm truly sliding into disrepair?

Finally reaching the gate to the white picket fence which enclosed the house, he slowed to a walk. The fence and the house both definitely could use a fresh coat of paint. Perhaps if he could find a few free hours he would have to work on it. It would definitely be a nice change to lose himself in a simple mindless task. And perhaps it would atone a little for having been gone for five years. Shaking his head, he knew it would take a lot more than just a little painting.

At the bottom of the steps, he paused for a moment to gather himself. He knew once he got passed the first minute everything would be okay, but that first minute was going to harder than any horror he had come up against in the eight years since he had first donned the blue tights and red cape; a costume he now hadn't worn in years.

Pulling himself together, Kal briskly climbed the three steps, pulled open the screen door, and firmly knocked on the wooden door. The two glass panes set into the door where covered by a translucent curtain. He could have looked straight through them with his x-ray vision, but at the moment he wanted to be his normal self, not Superman.

His mom had always been an early riser; he was the one who always needed to be kicked out of bed. So he assumed she was already up, but as the seconds ticked by he worried perhaps he was too early. Finally, after at least fifteen excruciating seconds, he saw a silhouette pass in front of the window on the left side of the kitchen.

Slowly the deadbolt on the door scraped out of the way and then the door knob began to turn. However after the agonizing wait for the knob to fully turn, the door seemed to open before he was ready.

Without waiting to recognize who was in the doorway, the familiar voice rang out with a 'Yes?'.

For several long seconds they both seemed to be frozen in place. He had had plenty of time to prepare for this moment, but the shock on her face was complete. While he waited for her to recover, he felt a shiver run down his spine. God, the past five years had been hard on her, he thought. He knew she would turn sixty-two next month, but when he had last seen her she had looked a youthful fifty. Now she looked every one of her sixty-two years. Oh, her hair was still just a couple shades on the red side of auburn, but he could see the mostly white roots. The crow's feet and the wrinkles around her mouth were much more pronounced than he remembered. But the hardest part were the eyes, her beautiful green eyes, which had always seemed to sparkle, were now dull and they appeared to have shrunk and sunken back into her head – the way they looked only in someone who was old.

Then the small green eyes seemed to disappear behind a flood of tears and with a whispered, "Clark", she pulled him into such a tight hug, he was almost glad for his superhuman strength. But then when he returned the slowly rocking hug, he felt the protruding ribs under the heavy old sweater she wore to ward off the early morning Kansas chill. Martha Kent had never been a stoutly built woman, but it felt like she had lost at least thirty pounds. Were the twenty years she seemed to have aged in the past five all his fault? Suddenly this moment was even harder than he had expected.

After a minute Martha pulled back, removed a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater, and dabbed at her eyes. "God, I must look such a mess. And I promised myself I wouldn't cry. But after five years I had almost given up hope this day was ever going to come."

"I know, Mom," answered Kal, his English feeling almost rusty, as he tried unsuccessfully to keep his own tears under control. "It has been a long journey for me, too."

"Have you been back long?"

He shook his head. "I arrived back at the Fortress ten minutes ago. I had a couple of things I needed to do there and then I came straight here."

"Well, no point standing here in the doorway letting the flies in. Come into the kitchen where I can get a good look at you."

Martha led the way until she was standing by the sink. Then she turned and looked at the man standing before her, the man she would always think of as her little boy. However as she looked at him, she knew no one else would see a little boy. Oh, not that he had been a little boy the last time she had seen him either, but as she really looked at him, she saw a man fully in his prime. Since he had looked three years old when Jon and she had found him in the field during the meteor shower and she had been thirty-three, remembering his age had always been as easy as subtracting thirty from her own. So the Clark standing before would now be thirty-two. Running her eyes down his body, it looked like he had added twenty pounds of muscle in the intervening years. Or perhaps it was just an illusion created by his current attire. At least for today the flamboyant red, gold, and blue costume had been put away in favor of a form-fitting futuristic gray suit. It still was adorned with the giant 'S' on the chest, but with its matching gray color, only the slightly raised surface gave it away.

But for Martha it wasn't the clothes that defined the man, but the expression in his face and eyes. And when she looked in Clark's face all traces of the boy were gone. Now the look in his eyes said he had been forced to survive everything the world, no the universe, could throw at him and he had come out of the experience harder, more mature, but still intact.

Falling back on habit, Martha asked, "Can I get you anything, Clark? Orange juice? Coffee? Milk?"

Kal smiled. It had been years since he had had any of those. And it had also been years since he had really thought of himself as Clark. "Orange juice sounds good, Mom. Thanks."

Martha retrieved a juice glass from the cupboard. As she pulled the large glass bottle from the refrigerator, she quietly asked, "Did you find what you were looking for?"

As she handed him the glass he clearly read the second unasked question in her tone and expression – 'Will you be leaving again soon?'

Kal downed the glass' contents in a single swallow. Then he rose to his feet and walked over to the refrigerator. "No, I didn't find what I originally went looking for. But eventually, after many trials and hardships, I found something else. Something in some ways better than I had ever hoped or dreamed was possible."

Martha watched Clark's back as he stood gazing at the large collection of photos held onto the refrigerator door by little magnets. She could sense he had returned for some important reason, but she still knew him well enough to realize he wasn't quite ready to talk about it. God, Clark might be adopted, and an alien to boot, but in so many little ways he reminded her of Jonathan.

Clark found himself staring at the photos on the frig door. There were a few new ones he hadn't seen before, but most of them had been there for years, many dating all the way back to high school. There was one of him, Chloe, and Pete crowded around the mock-up table at the Torch frantically trying to put the weekly edition to bed. Another showed him dancing with Lana at the Prom. Several showed him doing things with his Dad including one from all the way back when he was twelve; the day they had limited out while fishing at Crater Lake. Several showed just his parents and several showed him and Lois. The most recent one of him showed him sitting at his desk at the Planet with his feet up looking as though he owned the world. Lois had taken it maybe a week before Zod had shown up and, up until recently, it had been one of the happiest times of his life. It was the one time he had voluntarily given up his powers and he had thought he was going to be a happy mortal for the rest of his life. But being 'normal' had never been part of his destiny.

With a final glance at the photos, and spying how Lex still rated one picture on his Mom's wall of honor, he turned back to her. "So, how's Chloe? Except for you and Lois, she is the one I have missed talking to the most since I have been gone."

Martha felt her face sag. She understood how Clark was trying to ease back into things by asking about Chloe before Lois, but it wasn't an easy place to start. But then she couldn't think of hardly any good news in her life to share with Clark. No, the five years he had been gone were almost uniformly bad.

Clark frowned as he watched her run her fingers through her hair. It was a nervous habit she didn't exhibit often. Damn, before she even opened her mouth, he knew the news was going to be bad.

"Chloe was on special assignment for the Times over in Taiwan when the war turned hot. I haven't heard any word of her in almost a year. There are rumors on the Net about slave labor camps, but realistically, I would have to guess she is dead."

"War?" Clark whispered. Somehow he had assumed everything would be the same as when he left. But the world goes on, even when you are gone. But war? And somehow the phrase 'turning hot' brought to mind images of the 1950s and school children crouched under their desks waiting for the missiles to arrive. "Nukes?"

Martha nodded and then contradictorily shook her head. "Oh, not between us and the Chinese. After years, no decades of talk, the Chinese finally decided they wanted Taiwan and invaded with several million men. But they wanted the island and its infrastructure intact. No, it was the North Koreans. They decided with our attention focused further south, it was a good time to settle old grievances. Ten months ago, oh you'll hear 'Remember the seventeenth' a lot, they salvoed eight long range missiles. Our missile defense system got six of them, but we lost most of Seattle and San Francisco."

"They . . . those cities have been destroyed by nukes?" asked Kal barely able to comprehend. He had been raised on Earth and still in many ways thought of it as home. And, damn it, it was his job to protect it. But no, he had to go off on an odyssey of self-discovery when he should have been here.

"Yeah, it was pretty bad. The casualty count is over six million and that doesn't even include all the people who will succumb to radiation poisoning. But at least it ended the Sino-American war. China doesn't want a full-out nuclear exchange anymore than we do. Of course, they had already achieve their objective of kicking us out of Taiwan, so it didn't hurt them in world opinion to finally roll in and crush the North Koreans."

"So, Taiwan was never nuked?" Kal asked.

Martha shook her head. "No. They did use a couple of EMP bombs to temporarily knock down the electrical systems, but never any nukes."

Kal's heart rose a little. Chloe was the toughest, most resilient person he had ever known. If there had been nukes involved, he wasn't certain of her ability to survive. But short of that, he couldn't imagine anything Chloe Sullivan couldn't handle. He felt a strong urge to put on his white hat and race off in search of her this very second. But IF she had survived a year, possibly in captivity, a few more hours wouldn't matter. And at the moment he could sense his Mom needed his continuing presence.

Putting his concern for Chloe aside for the moment, he moved on to the harder topic, Lois. It still bothered him a lot that when he took off for Krypton, he hadn't said good-bye, hadn't even left a note. But at the time being near Lois had been so hard, so absolutely painful. He had had two whole wonderful months with her after she had discovered his secret and he had given up his powers. They had been the two happiest months in his life with the freedom to touch her anyway he wanted and never feeling the need to hold back because he might hurt her if his attention flagged during a moment of passion. But then Zod had appeared and he had been forced to resume the mantle of Superman with all of its associated baggage. And once Zod had been defeated, he finally understood that being Superman was part of his reason for existing and, at least then, he had had no way of turning Superman on and off. No, he either was Superman or he wasn't. And if he was Superman, he couldn't risk being more than just Lois' friend. And after being her lover, going back to being her friend had seemed an impossible step. When the astronomers discovered the location of Krypton, he had jumped at the excuse to escape. But what had his departure done to Lois? He had told his mother he was leaving and look at the state she was still in.

Steeling himself, he forced out the question, although the best he seemed able to do was a hoarse whisper. "And Lois?"

Martha's thoughts were still on Chloe. In many ways she was the closest thing Martha had to a daughter. Oh, she had become closer to Lois over the past five years, but Chloe was the one who hung around the Kent farm the most while Clark had been growing up, had always been his best bud. When Chloe had disappeared in Taiwan it had been almost as bad as when Clark left, maybe harder. For there had always been some hope Clark would return, but as the weeks turned into months without word, her hopes of seeing Chloe again had really faded.

And thoughts of the loss of Chloe brought back memories of all the others she had lost, but most especially Jonathan. Her eyes were drawn to the rapid brightening of the light shining through the window and she suddenly remembered she needed to stop at the cemetery and water the flowers before it was time to head to work. Realizing it had been years, since Clark had been to his father's grave, she asked the question before his own quiet question fully sank in.

"How about we continue this out at the cemetery?"

Then she saw the shock on his face and realized her mind had drifted off during their conversation, as seemed to happen to her more often in the past few years. Was this really what it meant to be getting old, she wondered.

"No, no, Clark," Martha said quickly. "I didn't mean it that way. Lois is fine. Talking about Chloe just turned my thoughts to death and dying. And that reminded me I need to stop by the cemetery and water the flowers before going to work. You'll have to forgive an old woman for saying aloud what was running through her head without first listening to what you were saying."

Kal took a deep breath to slow his racing heart. For at his Mom's comment, it had started beating harder and faster than it ever had against the numerous evil monsters he had dealt with during his life. If Lois had died without his having an opportunity to clear things between them, or at least try, he didn't know how he could move forward with his life without a perpetual cloud in the back of his mind. Was that instant of fear anything like what Lois had felt after his unexplained departure? God, for all of his super-human gifts, his behavior on that day five years earlier had been anything but 'super'. Was he 'Superman' or just a scared, selfish little boy pretending to be a man?

Understanding they both needed to clear their thoughts before moving on to the topic of Lois, Kal nodded to his mother. "Yes, I would be happy to go with you out to the cemetery."

Then looking down at his gray Kryptonian uni-suit, he asked, "Ah, Mom, do you still have any of my old clothes?"

He watched as the first real smile he had seen crossed her face.

"Yeah, Clark, I kept a few of your old things, they are in your closet. Although I am afraid you won't find a very big selection; I gave most of your things, and Jonathan's too, to the Salvation Army after the . . . well the events on the coast."

"Whatever you have will be fine. I just don't want to be seen around Smallville in this, it will raise too many questions."

Martha nodded. "I do like it, you know," she began with a gesture towards his gray outfit. "It suits you better than the red and blue."

"Good, as the old suit was destroyed a long time ago."

"Destroyed? I thought that material was supposed to be impervious to anything."

Kal shrugged. "Nothing is impervious to everything."

As she watched him climb the stairs to his old room, she wondered if he was talking about the Superman suit or himself. She got the strong feeling he was not talking about the suit. What had he been through during the five missing years?

- + - + - + - +

They walked out to the small cemetery mostly in silence, still getting used to being around each other after the long separation. As they skirted the woods behind Nell Lang's old place, Kal once more noticed the change in crops compared to the good old days when he had been growing up in Smallville. Finally, when the cemetery had just come into sight, he asked.

"Mom, what's with all the sorghum and wheat? Where is the corn?"

"The climate has been shifting faster in the past few years. Most of the Artic ice field is gone now in the summer. Surely, you must have noticed the change up at the Fortress."

Kal shook his head. "I guess I had other things on my mind and wasn't paying much attention. The Fortress wasn't much different and I know its crystalline structure extends all the way to the bedrock. So, yeah, there was maybe more open water on the trip down, but there were warm summers before I left, too."

"Well, it is a lot warmer here than it used to be. Drier, too. The southern edge of the corn belt has moved about three hundred miles north. Unfortunately, the summers are still too short for a good growing season in most of Canada, so the northern edge of the corn belt has move up less than a hundred miles. The end result is less corn and more expensive corn, which in turn drives up the cost of livestock. Meat is becoming a bit of a luxury for many people."

Kal looked over at his Mom with her wane, drawn face. "Mom, are you getting by okay?"

Martha looked at her son and forced a small smile. "I'm getting by. I rent out the farm to the Thorton brothers and I still have my job running the Talon. I am afraid my appearance is due more to my fading appetite than to a lack of funds."

Kal was going to promise to help now that he was back, but decided she would know it without him having to say it out loud.

They reached the old iron gate leading into the cemetery and it swung open without a single squeak. Obviously, his Mom or someone was seeing to the upkeep.

As they stepped inside, Kal let his gaze wander around. Nothing much had changed since the last time he had been here seven or eight years ago. A few new tombstones had sprouted up, but his old friends like the life-sized winged angel at the Harrison grave remained.

Quietly the pair followed the familiar path to the Kent plot; a place that was now home to four generations of the family. Silently, they paused for a moment in front the black marble marker with the name KENT engraved near the top in large letters. Below it on the left it read 'Jonathan 1957-2006' and on the right 'Martha 1958-' and near the bottom in smaller lettering 'Loving Parents of Clark'.

As Kal stared down at the headstone, he found it hard to believe it had been fourteen years since his father's death. It still seemed like yesterday that the two of them had been arguing about him playing high school football. He slowly shook his head at the memory of how his father had ultimately bowed to Clark's wishes and allowed him to play, but in the end his father had been right. Clark's playing HAD been unfair to the others on the team or the ones who should have been on the team in his place. And there had been other things he should have focused his time and attention on instead, even if it had only been spending more time with his father. But then you never in your heart expected your own Dad to succumb to a heart attack at age forty-eight.

After a minute of silence, Martha tried to lighten the mood. "Come on, Clark. Help me get a couple of buckets of water. These flowers are looking awful thirsty."

They made their way over to a small utility shed about two hundred feet away and Martha pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked the door. Reaching inside, she pulled out a pair of old plastic two gallon buckets. Handing them to Clark she pointed around the corner.

"The faucet is just over there."

Once the pails were full, they walked together back to the gravesite. A light breeze rustling the leaves in the few tall trees scattered around the grounds made the only sound. Kal wondered if all cemeteries were as tranquil and peaceful as this one.

After watering the flowers planted around Jonathan's parents and grandparents headstones, Martha used the last of the water on the flowers around her husband's marker. Then she knelt down and busied her hands with the few stray weeds.

"Lois?" asked Kal.

Without looking up, Martha responded. "The first few months were very hard on her. She was deeply in love with you, you know. And you just walked away without a word. I tried to explain what I knew, but even I didn't really understand why you left."

Kal heard her question, but after all the years he found it hard to justify his actions even to himself. How would he ever explain it to his Mom or Lois?

After Clark remained silent for almost a minute, Martha continued, "Eventually, Lois pulled herself together and threw herself back into her work and got on with her life."

Martha made the conscious decision to let Lois decide what details of her personal life she wanted to share with Clark. She was just glad Clark hadn't commented about the picture on the refrigerator of her and Jason from her trip to Metropolis last Christmas. But then if Lois had been in the photo, it would have been far more likely to have piqued his curiosity.

Returning to Lois' professional life rather than her personal life, Martha went on, "Lois has made quite the name for herself in the past couple of years. She even won a Pulitzer. You'll hear this somewhere anyway, so it might as well be from me. The title of the essay was 'Why the World Doesn't Need Superman'. Although I think its real title should have been 'Why Lois Lane Doesn't Need Superman'. You may not want to hear this but I think it was very cathartic for her and I don't think she truly accepted you were gone from her life and was ready to move on until she wrote it."

Martha paused to look up at Clark where he stood above her, his head seemingly haloed in the bright light. "Clark, I hope you aren't going to mess things up for her; she deserves better than that, particularly after what happened at the awards ceremony."

Kal slumped to his knees beside his mother. It was never pleasant to experience . . . oh, what was that old phrase? . . . oh, yeah . . . 'tough love' . . . especially from a mother you haven't seen in years. But he knew he deserved it after his earlier behavior.

"Mom, I never . . . I never intended to hurt her . . . or you. But, I don't know how to explain . . . I was so messed up inside after everything with Zod and the return of my 'gifts', I simply couldn't face her. How could I tell her I could never touch her again? Because what if in some moment of passion, I lost control and hurt or even killed her? I had to get away until I was under control and could do and say what was necessary without breaking down."

Martha heard his words and they brought back memories of Clark and Lana during his first year of college only a few months before Jonathan's death. Then, too, his powers had been stripped away for awhile and his relationship with Lana had rushed forward with almost frightening speed. At least until the return of his powers had slammed on the brakes and torn that relationship apart too. Was that the real issue? He had always said he could completely control his gifts out on the football field, but maybe he didn't trust his control in a more intimate situation. Then Martha remembered the early days of her own relationship with his father. What if Jonathan had had one hundred or one thousand times his own strength, would she have survived some of their lovemaking? Slowly, after all of the years, she finally started to understand a little of Clark's behavior and his never-ending desire to be 'normal'.

After a few more minutes of silence, Kal asked, "What happened at the awards ceremony?"

Martha stopped pretending to pull weeds, straightened up, and rested her hands in her lap. "You have to understand. The Pulitzers were announced about three weeks before the Chinese invaded Taiwan. Between the war and then the North Koreans' attack, the ceremony kept getting pushed back and back. When it finally happened, the world was a much different place than when they had been announced. When Lois started to make her acceptance speech, a few people in the audience started jeering. Then it spread and spread until she was booed off the stage. And it didn't end there. She has been attacked several times in public. The Planet has continued to stand behind her, but the last few months have been very hard on her. The public needs heroes now and she is perceived to be 'anti-hero' by many."

Kal stared at his father's headstone wishing once more he could speak to him. Everything had always seemed so clear to his father. And though he hated to admit it when he was younger, he now realized how often the old man had been right.

Perhaps he could just talk to him in his head the way he and Lana had talked to her parents on that long ago evening when he had first learned his strange gifts were because he was an alien. Thinking about that previous conversation, Kal couldn't help but look over at the Lang gravesite a mere fifty feet away. But immediately he wished he hadn't, as it was impossible not to notice Lana's smaller marker next to her parents. Or remember the night everything had gone crazy with Lana and Lionel dead and Lex driven insane with grief. One more time he had royal screwed up and for all his great powers, everything had still gone wrong.

At least that time, when Lex got control of the nuclear missiles, he had managed to stop one and minimize the damage of the other. But in the end all he had done was bought San Francisco a few more years. Yeah, some hero he was.

"Mom, I didn't come back here to be a hero. Oh, I will try to help out where I can, but that's not why I am here."

Martha looked over at her son kneeling beside her. "Then why are you here?"

Clark reached over and clasped his mother's hand. He hadn't returned to Earth to end up in this dark, maudlin mood. Things hadn't gone at all like the way he had expected when he had knocked on his mother's door. But then obviously things hadn't been going well for his Mom, or Lois, or Chloe, or frankly anyone on earth since he had been gone.

"Mom, at this moment, this is going to sound hard to believe," and here Kal paused to squeeze her hand, "But I returned because of a girl."

Martha stared at his face and saw a small smile form at the corners of his lips. "A girl? But you just said the whole reason you left was because you were afraid of hurting Lois."

Kal felt his face flush a little. This wasn't exactly how this kind of conversation was supposed to go with your mother. "I never said she was from around here."

The light bulb clicked on in Martha's head. "You FOUND Krypton?"

Martha watched as a touch of sadness filled his eyes for a moment as Clark shook his head.

"No, when I reached Krypton it was utterly shattered into small pieces. All that is left of it now is a ring of rubble circling its red star just like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter."

"Then where?" breathed Martha.

"Remember our old buddy, Brainiac?" asked Kal.

Martha felt a shudder ripple through her body followed by goose bumps even though the temperature was steadily climbing into the eighties on its way to another hundred-plus high. How could she forget that vile man, no vile creature or alien construct or whatever he was?

"Brainiac?" she whispered, as though the mere mention of his name might bring him back.

"Yeah, him," responded Clark. "Some time in the past, not too long before the planet's destruction, Brainiac showed up there in a spaceship with an extremely powerful miniaturization weapon. He used it to reduce Krypton's capitol city, Kandor, and sixty surrounding miles of countryside, and all of the city's inhabitants until they fit into a specially designed jar, not more than four feet in diameter. He had some dark evil scheme which needed them. It was simply a coincidence that it meant two hundred forty thousand Kryptonians were off-planet when the end came.

"I was searching the Kryptonian solar system for signs of survivors and the strongest trace I could find ultimately led me to Brainiac. It was a long difficult struggle and I think it is a story for another day, but in the end I wrested control of the jar containing Kandor from him. I spent most of the two year return voyage in Kandor working with their best scientists trying to come up with some way to reverse the effect."

Martha looked at him with rapt attention, fully enthralled by his story. "If you can't reverse the effect how could you have spent time in Kandor? You would have had to have been miniaturized, too. But you are obviously full-sized now."

"In the battle with Brianiac, the weapon was destroyed and all records of how it worked. I did manage to secure the prototype, which can transform one or two people at a time, but so far we have been unable to reverse engineer the principles involved."

"Even if you can only do one or two at a time, it wouldn't take forever to transform all of the inhabitants," stated Martha with simple logic.

"It isn't that easy," began Clark with a sorrowful shake of his head. "Remember all of the havoc Zod and his two cohorts wreaked? Or the number of people who despise me because of my abilities? Now try to imagine if there were a quarter of a million people around with my gifts. And the Kryptonians are no better or worse than humans. If they were let loose, I am afraid the Earth would see a war unlike any it can imagine as some of the Kryptonians fought for control. For the present, they need to stay in that bottle where its special lighting and atmosphere limit them to normal human abilities. If we ever figure out how to restore the city, I will relocate it to some distance planet where they can't do the earth any harm."

Martha shuttered as she remembered the home video footage she had seen on TV of Clark's battle against Zod in Metropolis. If even one hundred out of the two hundred forty thousand inhabitants were half as bad as Zod, she could see how quickly the disasters in Seattle and San Francisco would pale to insignificance.

Then she keyed in on some of the other things Clark had said. "Normal humans? So when they are in the bottle, they don't have any of your abilities?"

"No, and neither do I."

"So you have spent most of the past two years without your abilities?"

"Yeah, and it felt great to be like everyone else. It was almost difficult to force myself to leave and come here."

"Well, I am glad you did," said Martha as she reached over to squeeze his hand like he had gently squeezed hers earlier. "Now, I think it is time you told me a little about this girl."

Martha watched as a grin crossed Clark's face like she hadn't seen since her visit to Metropolis a month before Zod's arrival. It really warmed her heart to see her son so happy, particularly after the difficult topics of Chloe and Lois.

"Her name is Lyla. Lyla Lerrol. Now don't laugh, but she is an actress. Well, on Krypton they are called emotive actresses. Their movies are a little different from here. They have the technology to record and transmit people's emotions. So by wearing these special caps, you not only watch the movie, but also experience what the actors are feeling. It takes a special class of actors to get so fully into the character that their emotions ring true. And Lyla is one of the best. And more than that, she is smart, fun, and . . . well, pretty easy on the eyes."

"So, how exactly did you end up with an actress?" asked Martha with a hint of humor coloring her tone.

"Well, I am a bit of a celebrity there. 'The Savior of Kandor' is what it reads on the statue in front of the Hall of Justice. . ." began Clark when Martha interrupted.

"Wait a minute. You have a statue?"

Clark got the bashful grin she remembered so well from his high school years when he secretly used his gifts to save the day and then had to pass it off as dumb luck or the like.

"Several, actually. Everyone there knows about me and it's no big deal. It is even kind of nice not to always have to pretend to be something other than my true self."

Martha nodded. All Clark had ever wanted was to fit in and be normal. And maybe now he had finally found a place where he could.

"So did you meet Lyla at some gala event?"

For a moment Clark chuckled. "No. At first, until I found a place of my own, I was staying in the home of one of the scientists I was working with and Lyla happened to be his daughter. At first she just came around maybe once a week for dinner, but after a couple of months, things just started to click with us."

Martha found herself grinning along with Clark. When he had first shown up on her doorstep this morning she had never imagined things would turn out like this. Perhaps if both Lois and Clark had moved on, their first meeting needn't be as hard as she feared, although it did still leave the question of Jason.

"I am really looking forward to meeting her, Clark."

Kal climbed to his feet and reached down his hand. "There is no time like the present."

"What, right now?" exclaimed Martha, as she rose to her feet. "But I have to work today."

"Surely, you can take a day off for a special occasion like this. And I want to show Kandor to you."

"You mean actually go there? Me?"

"Yes. That is one of the things I had to do before coming to see you. I did all of the necessary tests and while the bottle containing Kandor is within this solar system, it is perfectly safe for a human to visit there. And you will have the same abilities as everyone else does there, which means you will be perfectly normal. Oh, the simulated sky is a different color, but the air and gravity will feel just the same."

Martha never dreamed when she woke up this morning that she might be visiting what was, in effect, an alien world today. For a moment she just stood there in shock. Then her thoughts, which seemed to be spinning in a fast circle, were interrupted by a phone call.

"Oh, Clark, I need to take this call."

Kal hadn't heard a phone ring and then was somewhat startled as he saw his Mom's eyes suddenly turn gray. Looking a little closer he saw a uniform gray color had covered her pupils, her irises, and even a bit of the whites. Then he cranked up his telescopic vision, looked a lot closer, and discovered she was wearing some kind of contacts which had changed color.

"Hi, Holly," said his Mom into the thin air. "I was just about to call you. You will never guess who is here. It's Clark. He just showed up for a surprise visit from Australia. And you can't imagine how good it is to see him. Oh, let a Mom show off her son for a minute. Here's a quick look."

Kal just stood there as his mother's solid gray eyes swept up and down his body.

"Doesn't it look like they have been treating him good? And he was just telling me all about his new girl friend."

Martha paused and appeared to listen for a moment. "Well, I will be sure to send you a picture of her at my first chance. Anyway, I really want to spend the day with Clark. Do you think you can handle things yourself? This is Carol's day off, but I think she said she was just going to hanging out, so call her and see if she can give you a hand."

Martha paused again and then concluded, "Thanks, Holly. I'll owe you one. Bye."

Then as Clark watched the contacts she was wearing cleared and once more he could see her green eyes. And then as he looked at her, he realized during the last ten minutes it was like ten years had been subtracted from her appearance. She stood a little straighter and the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth had once more transformed into laugh-lines.

"What's up with the contacts, Mom?"

"Oh, that's right you have been gone a long time. There might be wars and famines, but technology keeps marching forward. Everyone is wearing them now. They just swept the country like cell phones did twenty years ago. From the inside they are like watching a high quality movie screen. In fact that is how most people watch TV and movies today, right on the inside of their contacts. And with a slightly different signal to each eye everything is in true 3-D. We haven't quite reached the 'holodeck' from the old Star Trek shows we watched when you were little, but it is getting close. And you can pull up anything you want from the 'net with simple voice commands. The outside surface has a camera function, so you can let anyone you are talking to see exactly what you are seeing."

Then Martha grinned, "They even let you feel a little like Superman. These can zoom your vision by a factor of four on command. There are some that will do a lot more, but they give these basic versions away for free. Oh, and they can also store a couple hours of video. Would it be okay if I take some pictures of you and Lyla?"

Clark nodded his head. His mom had never been one of those of the old generation who pathologically avoided technology, but she had never particularly rushed to it either. If she was sporting these contacts, a lot of others must be too. Things certainly had changed a lot, both good and bad, while he was gone.

"Sure, Mom. Take as many pictures as you want. Well, maybe you should try to avoid taking too many with the alien cityscapes in the background. But most places shouldn't be a problem."

Then Clark moved as though to pick her up. "Ready?"

"What? Now? Clark Kent, if you think you are going to take me to meet your girlfriend without giving me a chance to put on a dress and do my hair, you are sadly mistaken."

Clark grinned. This sounded like his old Mom.

"Okay, okay. We'll go back to the house first. Satisfied?"

He watched Martha nodded.

As they turned and walked towards the gate, Lana's grave once more caught his eye. And when he thought of Lana these days, he always thought of Lex, too. Oh, he had hung around with Lana during high school and college, even dated her for awhile. But during the last six years of her life she had been with Lex. God, if only things hadn't gone so wrong. If Lana was still alive, Lex would never have ended up in the place he was in.

"Mom, how's Lex?"

As she paused to pull the cemetery gate shut behind her, she sighed. "About the same as when you left. I was up to see him about six weeks ago. He still thinks it is 2001, the year he first arrived in Smallville. It is so sad."

"And he is still wearing the gloves?"

"Yeah, I always double check with the doctors to be sure."

Clark nodded. Then he turned his thoughts back to happier things.

"Mom wait until you see the Flame Dragons. A small nest of them were just within range when Kandor got miniaturized one hundred years ago. Now there are almost eighty of them. They grow to two hundred feet long and belch fire that can burn through a foot thick plate of steel. They are so cool."

Martha thought they sounded more scary than cool. And then it started to sink in. She was about to travel to what was effectively an alien world. To Kandor.

End of Chapter 1

Author's Notes:

I went to see 'Superman Returns' during opening weekend on the big IMAX screen in 3-D. It was wonderful after waiting almost twenty years to see Superman once more up on the big screen. And the action sequences with state of the art special effects were great – you actually could believe a man can fly.

Then I went back to see it again this past weekend because I had a free ticket. Now, knowing what to expect I could focus more on the story. And you know, on the whole the movie is rather disappointing. It felt like an unimaginative homage/remake of the first movie. There was the same Lex who seems to me to be a bumbling fool rather than a scary adversary worthy of Superman. And the endless use of snippets of dialogue from the first movie which were lame twenty-five years ago and even more so today. And Lex's bimbo girl friend and buffoonish sidekicks. And what was the deal with the 'Superman's spaceship crashing near his mother's farm' sequence? So the Kryptonians can build ships which can cross lightyears of space, but they can't land without crashing? The misfires in this movie seemed just endless.

So I was sitting here the other night thinking about what I would have done differently. The 'missing for five years' seemed interesting, but their explanation on his return seemed lame and unconvincing. And the 'son' angle was intriguing. But the whole Lex plot needed to go – I mean, 'been there, done that'.

I spent about ten minutes thinking about it and this whole chapter just gelled in my head. (If only I could write that fast as it took me about twelve hours to get it down on paper!) Doing something like bringing in 'Kandor – City in a Bottle' from the old comics would open so many story possibilities. First, it provided an opportunity to give Superman a Kryptonian girl friend, someone who could truly be his equal. And now, where in the movie Superman comes across almost like someone halfway between a peeping Tom and a stalker, you instead have two interesting romantic triangles – Richard, Lois, Superman – and – Lois, Superman, Lyla. (Oh, for those of you who don't know Lyla Lerrol was Superman's Kryptonian girlfriend during a comic back in the early 1960's when he was swept to Krypton through a time vortex that saw him working as his own father's assistant while trying to save Krypton from the impeding disaster. I decided to use a little artistic license to relocate her to Kandor.) So, now there are plot possibilities like bringing Lyla into the real world for awhile to experience superpowers. Or bringing Lois to Kandor where Clark is normal and they can be together.

The other nice thing about introducing Kandor is all the potential back stories to flesh out the plot and make everything feel more real. The history of Krypton. The history of Kandor. The story of Brainiac's theft of Kandor. The history of Brainiac. The story of Superman's battle to retrieve Kandor. The history of Lyla. The story of Superman and Lyla getting together. And on and on and on.

Anyway, this first chapter was banging around in my head in the most distracting manner and I had to get it down on paper. The question now is – Is there enough interest by people wanting to read this story that I should continue? If you would like to read more, send me a review or a PM, else I will just focus on my 'Biological Families' saga over on the Smallville side. Oh, and I don't really have much beyond this point plotted out in my head yet (other than probably doing my interpretation of the airplane-shuttle sequence to bring Lois and Superman together for the first time), so if you have anything you would like to see in the story, suggest away. In my other stories I have generally tried to be responsive to suggestions from the readers.

Anyway, I hope you found this chapter interesting. And if you would like to see more, drop me a review.

Duane


	2. Chapter 2

8/1/06

Kandor - Chapter 2

"Okay," began Kal with one hand on the mechanism which would open the eight foot thick Kryptonium door and the other holding the lightweight helmet with its large clear faceshield. "Now remember, once I open this door we will be exposed to the artificial red sun which provides light for Kandor. And it is this light which limits the Kryptonians' powers to that of ordinary men, which means my powers will be stripped away, too."

Martha nodded. Fortunately, Clark had explained all of this back in Smallville, because at the moment most of her attention was focused on adjusting her jetpack in hopes of finding a more comfortable fit. The unit only weighed six or seven pounds and looped around the waist. It looked like a four inch wide metallic gold belt with odd protuberances sticking out in six places. Clark had explained it was based on anti-gravity principles the Kryptonians had been using for hundreds of years, but that still didn't prevent it from chafing her left hip.

Kal pulled the lever and the door groaned open with a deep low-frequency rumble like a bank vault door in some old British movie. Once the door had moved a fraction of an inch, a brief high-pitched whistling noise was heard as the air pressure in this room, which acted like an air-lock, equalized with that of Kandor. Then several seconds later the first faint red glow became visible through the widening crack and Kal could feel all of his special powers begin to leech away.

The transition to 'normal' was always an eerie sensation. For some gifts like his strength, it wasn't even noticeable until he tried to use them. But for others it was immediately apparent and very disconcerting. The worst was his vision; it was like he was suddenly half blind, being able to see only in the normal visible-light spectrum. Was this how ordinary people felt who needed glasses? And at the thought of glasses, he wondered how his Clark Kent personae was going to function in Metropolis without glasses, as from what his Mom had said, absolutely everyone now wore the futuristic contacts.

As the door slid fully open, Kal was just glad the access point, and the associated loss of his strength and stamina, was at the very bottom of the special metallic plug which sealed the container. Now, in their miniaturized state, the one and one half inch thick plug was the equivalent of almost four vertical miles. Four miles of stairs would have been damned inconvenient without superspeed!

Taking his mother's hand, Kal led the way through the doorway and out onto the platform. The platform was large, at least one hundred feet by one thousand feet. Scattered across its surface were a variety of large machines - some created by the Kandorians for use in their attempts to breach Brainiac's defenses and some left over from Brainiac's reign. But Kal ignored all of these devices and led the way over to the railing.

Martha gasped when she saw the view and clenched Kal's hand so hard that with his superpowers gone, he couldn't help but wince.

"It's okay, Mom," said Kal in a soothing tone.

"But . . . but, I can barely even see the ground," began Martha.

Kal looked down and could easily understand his Mother's anxiety. Besides him only a few hundred astronauts had ever seen the earth from such a vantage point. And those astronauts had been either in a spaceship or spacesuit, not standing exposed on what suddenly must feel like the edge of an infinite drop while a turbulent breeze buffeted you about.

"I would have tried to explain earlier, but it is difficult to grasp without seeing it for yourself. Saying Kandor is a 'city in a bottle' makes it sound small and insignificant, but when miniaturized to this scale you can see there is nothing small about it. Seen from the inside and viewed from the Kandorians' perspective, the jar is one hundred twenty miles in diameter giving a surface area of just over ten thousand square miles. We are currently one hundred miles above the surface of Kandor, which is equivalent to the height at which several space stations orbit the earth. The surface of Kandor itself is twenty miles above the bottom of the jar and according to the Kandorians' studies, Brainiac's machine went deep enough so the lowest five miles is actually molten material from the outer core of the planet. Seen from the inside, this jar is nothing like a goldfish bowl with a couple of small buildings."

Martha stared down and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Several irregular emerald green shapes adorned the surface far below, which she quickly decided must be bodies of water. One large area showed geometric patterns on a grand scale in several shades of pale green and blue. Being an old farmer's wife, she quickly deduced that was land under cultivation. She tried to spot other signs of civilization but the ground was simply too far away to show things like roads or houses. She thought even from a hundred miles up she should have been able to spot the city itself, but if it was in the exact center of the jar, no – better to think of it as a miniature world, then her view of it was currently obscured by the giant structure hanging below them.

"Is that the artificial sun?" she asked while pointing to the massive globe located an apparent ten or fifteen miles below their current position. Martha had no idea how it worked but when looking at it from above, it was a globe about two miles in diameter supported by three massive tripod style struts each a half mile in diameter, which in turn were attached to the outer edges of this metal stopper. The upper surface of the sphere visible from their catwalk was a dark gray color, although whatever created the luminosity on its lower surface leaked around the edges so that it looked like the corona of the earth's sun as it appeared only during a full solar eclipse except being a brilliant red.

"Yeah, and it is another of Brainiac's feats the Kandorians have never been able to replicate or even fully understand. With all of his unimaginable intellectual gifts, it is hard to comprehend why he feels it is necessary to be so evil. I mean it certainly seems like he can create anything he wants, so why try to destroy everything he touches?" Kal concluded with a shake of his head.

Then he took his mother's hand and pulled her back away from the railing.

"How about we practice for a couple of minutes before starting down?" he suggested.

Martha was glad to step away from the edge. "If it is a hundred miles down, how long is it going to take?"

"Well, one of the Kandorians' newer sports, which has sprung up in the hundred years they have been trapped in this jar, is the Freefall League. They fly up here and try for the fastest freefall time down to the surface. There are a number of categories for different streamlining methods beyond the simplest method of just tucking into a ball. For the classic unaided class, I think the record is just over twenty minutes as three hundred miles an hour is about tops for the human body within the constant air pressure maintained in this chamber. Now if this chamber was more like earth where the air thins almost to a vacuum at this altitude, then the terminal velocities would be substantially higher."

"Three hundred miles an hour?" whispered Martha looking a little pale.

"Oh, we will go a lot slower until you are comfortable. It's not like we are in a big rush and if it takes a couple of hours to get down, it is no big deal." Clark paused to hoist his helmet. "And wearing the helmet to keep the wind out of your eyes and mouth makes a big difference. Oh, it's nothing like flying under your own power out in the real world, but it is still kind of fun."

Martha looked dubiously at her own helmet. She had never skydived in her life. Oh, Clark had carried her on a number of flights, including their just concluded trip from Smallville, but being in the safety of Clark's arms seemed way different than jumping off a hundred mile tall cliff.

"Let's start with the helmet, Mom," Clark suggested before donning his.

Martha slid hers on and discovered it felt a lot lighter than the one she used to wear when she went riding with Jonathan on his old Indian oh so many years ago. It really was just a lightweight shell with padded earpieces to hold it in place.

It seemed like as soon as it was in place she could clearly heard Clark's voice through the built-in speakers.

"Now, Mom remember I have a master control for your belt, so if at anytime you feel like you are in over your head, just say the word and I will take over."

Martha nodded; grateful Clark had a lot of practice with this freefall method of descent in addition to his years of experience with his own flying abilities.

As Kal explained the simple systems of three buttons and two joysticks for controlling altitude, rate of ascent/descent, and directional control, he wondered if his Mother would ever be ready for the express ride. Probably not, he quickly decided. Only a very few members of the Freefall League were crazy enough to don the old exoskeletal warsuits left over from the Clone War days. Only the armored warsuits were tough enough to withstand the stresses and temperatures from a steady five G ascent or descent. Accelerating at five G's got you to the halfway turnover point in less than sixty seconds, then decelerating at five G's brought you back to a stop at the top in another sixty seconds. One hundred miles straight up in just two minutes. The white-hot friction from the six thousand mile an hour peak speed at turnover was only survivable because the warsuits were designed to shake off direct hits from mega-joule energy weapons. Fortunately, the ceramic outer coating prevented heat build-up and you could still exit the suit quickly with only a minimum of burns. However as fast and exhilarating as the ride in the warsuit was, it was nowhere near as good as having his gifts under a yellow sun, but under a red sun, it was the best a Kryptonian could do.

But his Mom was scared enough of the descent, this wasn't the time to mention using the anti-gravity belts to speed up rather than slow down their descent. Although, hopefully once they were safely on their way he could ease their rate of descent up, as he was getting a feeling in his gut that time would soon be of essence. Luckily, when you were still tens of miles above the ground an extra one G of downward acceleration was hardly noticeable.

"Okay, Mom, let's start with a simple hover slightly above the deck," said Kal after completing the basic instructions.

Martha nodded and slowly adjusted the controls as Clark had explained. Gently her body began to feel lighter as the belt absorbed her weight. But it didn't feel at all like she was expecting. She thought it would feel like someone had grabbed the belt of her jeans and started lifting. But instead it felt like the belt was putting out some kind of field that enveloped her whole body and lifted each part simultaneously. As her body started to rise, her natural instinct was to maintain contact with the floor. At first she just rose up onto her toes. Then as her body continued to rise she found herself executing a perfect ballerina's 'en point' pose with only the tips of her big toes touching. And then she was clear of the floor and floating. For a moment she had the urge to pull her legs up into a fetal position, but then she forced herself to relax. And when she did she discovered the anti-gravity field, put out by the device, made it feel like she was standing on a solid surface, even though she knew nothing was there.

"Okay," said Kal pleased that she hadn't panicked so far. "Now let's rise up five feet. It might help to think that you are just standing in an invisible elevator."

Martha did as he instructed and found that the analogy actually helped.

"Now let's rotate until our bodies are parallel to the floor facing down."

This she found much more disconcerting. It was almost impossible to convince her brain that she was in an elevator in this position.

"Ahh, Clark, I am not enjoying this position at all."

"I think moving will help. How about you try to navigate to the big orange machine over to the left?"

Martha tried to remember which button and joystick combination controlled direction. She started with the lowest speed setting possible and after only a couple of false starts she managed to reach the chosen destination.

Kal picked several more target locations and after Martha had managed two in a row without any false steps, he decided it was time.

"Ready to head down, Mom?"

Martha had been feeling proud of her performance, but then a twinge of fear returned at the thought of facing the big drop. However, unless she wanted to give up and go straight back to Smallville, she was going to have to do this. Steeling herself, she nodded.

Kal rotated backed to a vertical position knowing it would be easier to go over the edge without forcing his Mom to face straight down.

Then just as they were clearing the edge, he pointed off to their left to distract her.

"Mom, we want to give the artificial sun a wide berth. Let's head over towards the outer wall for awhile. Having something 'real' nearby will help"

Martha looked in the direction he had pointed and tried to distinguish where exactly the wall of the giant cylinder began. By the time she noticed their position, they were already several hundred feet from the platform and it was receding rapidly behind them.

'Don't look down. Don't look down. Don't look down.' She kept repeating in her head.

"Clark, why am I having such a hard time seeing the wall? It can't be as far away as the ground." Damn, why did she have to use that word, she wondered.

"You won't be able to see it very well until we get a lot closer. From a distance it has an almost mirrored finish. The space inside this container is already very large, but apparently Brainiac was trying to create the allusion it is even bigger. The only reason I can think is that Brainiac did it to improve the mental state of the inhabitants. And that would only be necessary if his original plan required the Kandorians to be in here for a very long time. Well, the hundred years they have already spent in here sounds like a very long time, but then Brainiac always thinks in the very long term. Who knows, perhaps he intended to keep them in here for thousands of years to see how their civilization would evolve over time. I wonder how many more centuries it would take for Krypton to become nothing more than a myth to these people?"

"With Krypton truly gone, how long do you think it will take before it becomes a legend to them, even if you find a way to reverse the process and find them a new world to inhabit?"

"You're right, Mom. I hadn't really thought about it like that, but you are probably right. After a few centuries or millennia, their homeworld, no, my homeworld will turn into some almost forgotten myth."

Martha had known since the very first day they had found Clark out in the cornfield that he was an alien. She had even known of Krypton by name for many years. But hearing Clark speak about his homeworld while they were traveling to a city filled with people of his own kind, drove home for the first time that maybe she needed to prepare herself to losing him forever. Oh, he had been gone for five years and been back for barely more than an hour, but his original trip to Krypton had seemed little more than a pilgrimage. It had turned out to be a lot long than she had expected, but she had always, deep in heart, believed he would one day return and continue to call Earth home. Now, she wondered if Clark did manage to find a way to restore Kandor to its full-size, whether he wouldn't move with it to whatever new home planet he found for them. Could she handle another departure, particularly if this time he might have no intention of returning?

Martha liked to think of herself as being relatively tough and strong. She had survived the death of her husband many years earlier. She had survived the loss of Lana. She had survived Clark's departure for Krypton. She had survived the probable loss of Chloe. So why did she find her eyes tearing up so frequently today; on what should be this most happy of occasions?

Blinking hard to control the tears and swallowing a couple of times to ease the sudden tightness in her throat, she looked around for something to capture her attention and give her something less emotionally trying to focus her attention on.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she discovered the platform and even the artificial sun seemed to be miles behind. They couldn't have been moving that long, certainly not more than a couple of minutes. She hadn't touched the controls since they had slid slowly clear of the platform's railing, so Clark must have pushed up their speed.

Risking a look down, she could finally see the central portion of ground far below, framed by her dangling feet. And looking down at her feet she suddenly understood why Clark had suggested a pantsuit rather than a dress for today's little excursion.

Forcing her gaze past her brown tweed slacks, she could at last see the city of Kandor. Blinking one last time to clear her eyes, she cranked up the zoom capability of her contacts. However even at their maximum magnification factor of four, the city still looked a very long ways away and it was still difficult to discern much in the way of details.

Then a bright glittering object at the juncture of the floor and the wall of the cylinder caught her attention. Whatever it was, it looked even bigger than the city of Kandor. She was surprised she hadn't noticed from up on the platform, but perhaps their changing angle relative to the artificial sun now resulted in a brighter reflection.

"Clark, what is that?" she asked while pointing in the direction of the large jewel-like object.

Clark was glad she spoke up, she had been quiet longer than was typical for her and he had been afraid flying was having a more serious effect on her than he had hoped. Following the line of her finger, he immediately recognized what had caught her attention.

"Remember the flame-dragons I mentioned earlier? They are extremely powerful and dangerous. If they were allowed to run free, they would make life in this enclosed space impossible. But the Kandorians didn't want to simply wipe out one of the few species they had from home. So similar to the self-fabricating crystals of the fortress, they used their crystalline technology to enclose a forty mile wide by ten mile deep by ten mile high volume at the edge of their world for use by the dragons."

When he saw her nod that she understood, he continued. "I guess since we have some time, now is a good time to give you a little of the history of Kandor and Krypton so you will better understand the situation here. Some of this is information Jor left for me in the crystals and some of it I didn't find out until I talked to the people of Kandor.

"Kandor was the capitol of Krypton for thousands of years. Then about eleven hundred years ago a schism formed between the ruling high council and a group of the planet's leading scientists. Quickly the situation escalated out of control and the two factions ended up at war. This war, which they call the Clone War, roared on for almost eight hundred years, although Kandor was the very first casualty. It was utterly destroyed in the very first days by the Kryptonian equivalent of a hydrogen bomb."

Interrupting with a quick question, Martha asked. "Clone War? You mean like in the old Star Wars movies?"

Clark shook his head then remembered their helmets and how difficult it was to read facial expression with them on.

"No, it was quite different. The clones in Star Wars were the genetically identical men grown and trained as soldiers to fight in place of others in battle. Here, I mean on Krypton, the clones were spare bodies grown to provide replacement parts if you were seriously injured or because your body was simply wearing out from old age. The clones, which were full-sized replicas of the original Kryptonians, were supposed to be kept in a vegetative state. However in the same way as the First World War on Earth was instigated by the assassination of a relatively minor member of royalty, the Kryptonian war was a direct result of a single incident where a clone was illegally brought to consciousness. This led to a double murder/suicide which brought the whole cloning controversy to the forefront.

"Most people were aware, but conveniently ignored, the fact that with only small changes all of the clones being kept for spare parts could easily be brought awake. Some people, including several leading scientists, had been quietly saying for a long time that the keeping of clones was morally wrong and if it was the only way to extend Kryptonian life, then perhaps life shouldn't be extended. This incident served as a catalyst and led, ultimately, to war between those trying to maintain the status quo and those striving for change."

When Clark paused for a minute, Martha asked, "So who won this war?"

"The people fighting for the status quo, the right to continue using clones, won in the end. But then, in one of those strange ironies that plague Kryptonians as much as humans, less than ten years after the end of the war, someone discovered how to achieve all of the same life-extending effects through gene-therapy. Therefore less than thirty years after winning the war to allow cloning to continue, the process ended up being banned anyway. Of course, by then the damage had already been done."

"What damage?" asked Martha as their rapid onward motion brought them towards the outer wall of the cylinder. And as it came near enough to make out details she could see their motion was not on a level path, but rather they were spiraling downward at the same time. Looking back towards the center of the cylinder she could see they were already below the level of the artificial sun and its extreme brightness made their originally starting point impossible to see. Glancing at Clark, she could see his gray form-fitting attire had taken on a decidedly reddish cast.

"The Kryptonians had fought an all-out war for hundreds of years using weapons that quickly far exceeded the nuclear weapons currently available here on earth. The giant crystalline structures like the Fortress and the one you see below constraining the dragons were developed in response. These structures are impervious to atomics and most beamed weapons and were quickly thrown up to protect the surviving cities. Unfortunately as a result of the forces unleashed during the war, the planet was beset with massive sprawling ion radiation storms that continued to swirl around the planet's surface long after the war finally wound down. So even after the war ended the people and their cities were forced to continue to huddle behind and below the protective crystalline structures."

Clark pointed down to the city of Kandor which appeared to be slowly growing in size and grandeur as they descended. "The city of Kandor wasn't rebuilt until after the end of the Clone War and had only existed in its current form for less than two hundred years when Brainiac stole it from Krypton. And during those two hundred years, it, too, was hidden behind a crystal barrier. It was only after being placed in this jar, where it was finally safe from the ion storms, that its barrier was removed and Kandor for the first time in over a thousand years was able to stand once more under the light of the sun. Well, artificial red sun."

Martha looked down at the city below and tried to imagine it hidden under towering piles of crystal like the Fortress. She couldn't imagine living in a place where you couldn't look up and see the sky or the stars at night. Was life in this bottle actually better than life back on Krypton? She was suddenly gladder than ever that Clark had been sent to Earth. Oh, not glad in the sense that she was happy Krypton had to be destroyed to make it happen. But glad Clark hadn't been forced to grow up in a place which required everyone to hide behind protective barriers. What would that do to your mind and psyche?

Shaking off thoughts of how limiting life on Krypton must have been near the end, Martha forced her attention to the city spread out below them. Clark had said it had a population of about a quarter of a million, yet it seemed to spread over an area larger than Metropolis, a city with at least twenty times the number of inhabitants. Kandor had several central spires which appeared to reach well into the sky, but otherwise she saw few tall buildings. The terrain itself was a series of rolling hills and the buildings away from the city center seemed to follow the contours of the land.

As her eyes darted from one group of structures to the next, the buildings seemed to swell even as she watched. Quickly she stepped down the magnification of her contacts and the city moved away, but then immediately started to grow again.

Martha glanced over at Clark maintaining a parallel course not more than ten feet away and then back down to the ground. They had been traveling less than fifteen minutes and the ground looked minutes, not hours away.

"Ah, how fast are we going, Clark?" she asked.

Kal listened to the tone of her voice, but didn't really detect any panic. "Well, Mom, since you were doing okay, I picked up the pace a little. Are you still doing okay or should I slow us down?"

Martha had been sufficiently engrossed in Clark's story and then her own thoughts about Krypton that she hadn't been paying a lot of attention to what was going on around her. Now she did and quickly became aware of the buffeting of her clothes as they raced through the air. The headphones in the helmet did a very good job of blocking the wind noise and rather than a sense of motion the buffeting had felt more like an invigorating massage. But now that she remembered she was flying, she brought her hands away from the sides of her body and felt the wind rushing through her fingers. She knew she had flown a lot faster when carried in her son's arms, but that hadn't felt nearly the same. No, somehow the close proximity of his body had always reduced the wind in her face to an apparent gentle breeze. But not here, not now. At the moment it felt like she was flying and it wasn't nearly as unpleasant as she had expected.

"Yes, I am doing okay. Actually, I think I am starting to enjoy it. Imagine, a woman at my age flying. Is this what flying feels like to you back on Earth? Oh, you know what I mean."

Kal grinned to himself. This experience had turned out better than he had hoped. "It is somewhat similar. Of course, flying back on 'Earth' is better; I just have to think about it to be able to turn or climb rather than having to fiddle with the controls. But you do still get a little of the feeling of strength and power."

Yes, thought Martha, she could understand how flying could become addictive. She reached down to her flying belt to resume control of her own motion and as she banked into a gentle turn, she found she could start to understand at least the smallest bit of what her son meant when he spoke of a feeling of power.

As she wondered if life on Earth would be just as impacted, if these flying belts were readily available, as it had been impacted by the 'always on' network provided by the contact lenses, she began to notice specks of motion far below them. Quickly zooming her lenses, she discovered the air immediately above the city was filled with other people using matching belts. Apparently, flying was one of the common modes of transportation in Kandor. And that did help explain how the city seemed to have fewer roads than her Earth-centric brain expected. What other changes would easily available flight have wrought on these people and their city?

More and more details of the city unfolded before her eyes over the next couple of minutes. Finally, when they had almost approached the altitude used by the citizens of Kandor to transverse their city, Clark broke her reverie.

"Mom, my home is over to the right. Can you follow me down or would you like me to retake control?"

"I think I am good, Clark. And seeing how many others are currently in the air, it looks like I need to master it, if I am going to be able to get around."

"Okay, Mom. Although Kandor does have an extensive underground transportation system and there is an access point only a five minute walk from my house. The network not only covers Kandor, but over the past hundred years has been extended throughout the surrounding countryside. Many people get around just fine without ever taking to the air."

Martha nodded to herself at this information, but most of her thoughts were suddenly focused on Clark's several references to 'his home'. During his years in Metropolis all he had ever had was a series of apartments, none of which she would really call a home. So she was very curious at what his home would be like here in Kandor, where he had spent most of the past couple of years.

As they approached ground level, her eyes swept passed her son, who was flying a few feet in front of and below her, and out across the city beyond. They were currently just passing over the edge of the city heading in the general direction of the city center, whose central spires now resolved into structures which climbed almost a mile into the sky. Far beyond the city, right at the horizon, in the same general direction was the glittering structure of the dragon enclosure. For some reason her brain quickly associated this circular land with an old fashion clock face. The central spires were at center of the clock and the dragon enclosure was at 12 o'clock. Scanning what was visible of this world at their current thousand foot height, she quickly spotted the pair of lakes she had seen from their entry point at the top and her brain quickly identified the direction as 3 o'clock. The agricultural area extended from about 4 o'clock to 7 o'clock before petering off into a heaviliy wooded tract from 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock. The wooded area extended outward from the city almost to the horizon, which was lined by a group of modest hills. Or would they be classified as mountains by the standards of the old Hugh Grant movie from her youth, 'The English Man Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain', which suddenly popped into her head.

Turning her attention back forward, Martha saw they were rapidly approaching the ground, their altitude down to less than two hundred feet. Suddenly this 'head down' orientation they had been using started to feel like falling. But as the sensation fully started to hit, she saw Clark start to rotate to a 'feet first' vertical position. Quickly she followed suit and once more achieved the mental state of being able to convince her stomach and inner ear that she was descending in an invisible elevator.

Slowly she descended the last few feet until her searching toes encountered solid ground. As her full weight returned to her legs, it felt for a moment like her knees were going to buckle. However as soon as it started Clark seemed to be there with a supportive arm around her shoulders.

"So, how did you like the trip?" asked Kal.

Martha took a moment to catch her breathe and looked back up into the pale green sky with its central red sun hiding the place where the trip had begun. Then her eyes swept down and took in the distant horizon. They were standing atop a small rise which provided a panoramic view and what struck her was how she had no sense they were actually standing inside a cylindrical container. No, everything felt like they were standing on the surface of a regular planet, most definitely not the Earth, but still a real planet. Now standing on the ground, the horizon looked perfectly ordinary and the sky seemed to extend indefinitely.

"The trip was fine. No, more than fine, it was the most exhilarating thing I have done in years. But I am also happy to be back on solid ground."

Seeing she was doing okay, Kal dropped his arm, took a step away, and removed his helmet. He watched as his mother followed suit and as she stood there straightening her auburn hair with her fingers, he was struck by how much better, more alive, she looked now then when he had first shown up at her door in Smallville. Now, she looked at least ten years younger and no longer years older than her true age.

"Let's go inside and find something cool to drink. Flyin' is powerful, thirsty work," he concluded with his best 'old west' drawl. For the moment his thoughts lightened from the dark mood he had sunk into during the flight while remembering the destruction of Seattle and San Francisco he should have been here to prevent. And the strong urge he had been feeling to rush off in search of the long-missing Chloe.

"That sounds nice, Clark. An iced tea would be good right now. Oh, do they have iced tea here? If not, whatever you have will be fine."

"No iced tea I'm afraid, but I think I can find something similar."

Kal took his Mother's hand and led her down from their landing spot towards his Kandorian home. The house was located just below the crest of the hill on the side away from the city proper. It was partially recessed back into the hill with only a long line of windows on the exposed outer side.

When Kal had first retrieved Kandor from Brainiac's possession and figured out how to utilize Brainiac's prototype shrinking device to miniaturize himself to journey here to Kandor, the people had been extremely thankful. And when they had discovered he would be with them for the two year return voyage to Earth, they had offered him his choice of living accommodations. Most of the people who would eventually be his closest friends lived in the central towers. But when Clark had toured this new 'world', he had loved this spot. It was near the city, but the city itself was completely invisible. From here there was a panoramic view almost to the horizon, but in the direction of the agricultural sector and without another house in view. Back home on Earth he had felt compelled to live in Metropolis to be near the 'action'. But here he was 'normal' like everyone else and so there was no need to be constantly on the alert. This was the most tranquil place where he had ever lived since leaving Smallville and his youth behind. And the view of the croplands in the distance even made it feel a little bit like Smallville.

Martha followed her son down the hill. Looking down at her feet, she saw the ground was covered by a short purple plant which must be Kandor's version of grass. While it was only two inches tall like the grass back home, the individual blades were as broad as they were tall.

Looking from the grass below her feet up to the cloudless sky, Martha asked her son. "Is it always noon here? I don't see any clouds, does it rain? Do they have weather?"

Kal also glanced up at the sky before responding. "During daylight it is always noon, since the artificial sun doesn't traverse across the sky. But they do have day and night. The artificial sun is programmed to mimic its counterpart back at Krypton to the best of its ability. The Kryptonian day is twenty-six hours long. The artificial sun provides fourteen hours of daylight and then slowly transitions from daylight to darkness over a one hour period.

"The container is setup to inject water vapor at dusk up near the level of the artificial sun. The water vapor cools the upper air which then sinks. As it descends to the lower reaches of the atmosphere, it condenses into clouds and then finally into rain. Just like clockwork the clouds start to form an hour after dark and then it rains for an hour starting two hours after dark. A drainage system is located at the low spots of Kandor where it drains off the excess water to begin the cycle all over again."

"Ah, that explains all the vegetation visible on our way down. Thanks, Clark."

"No problem, Mom. I had most of the same questions when I first arrived here, too. And speaking of arriving, I would like to welcome you to my home."

Their walk down the hill had brought them to a terrace that stretched along the front of the house just below the row of windows and which separated the house from the drop-off to the small valley below. As they walked out onto the terrace, one of the large glass panels slid up to form a doorway into the building.

"Welcome back, Kal," called a melodious male voice in Kryptonese from a small speaker located near the open door.

"Thanks, Virgil," responded Clark still speaking in English. "It is good to be back. This is my Mother, Martha. Please grant her level one guest privileges."

"Of course, sir," responded the voice now speaking impeccable English. "Martha, I hope you enjoy your stay here in Kandor. If there is anything I can do for you, don't hesitate to ask."

"Ah, thanks, Virgil," answered Martha with a hint of hesitation in her voice. Who was Virgil she wondered, some kind of butler? Somehow she couldn't picture Clark having a butler.

"Virgil?" she mouthed once she had caught Clark's eye.

"Oh, I should've explained. Virgil is the brain that takes care of the house for me. Well, him and the staff of robots he coordinates."

"Brain?" asked Martha in a voice which had climbed from a whisper almost back to her normal timbre.

"It is the Kryptonian term for computer. Well, sort of. Their methods and technologies are somewhat different from Earth's, but in this case the term 'computer' is close enough. Anyway, the homes here are a lot more automated then back home, at least compared to the 'back home' I remember from five years ago."

"And Virgil?" Martha asked.

"It is customary for the owner to select the name for the house brain. Well, calling it Martha or Jonathan didn't feel right and neither did Lois or Lana or Chloe. So, in the end I named it after Doctor Swann, since he was the one who first started me on the course to find my true Kryptonian heritage.

Kal removed his flying belt and dropped it on a small table beside the door. Gesturing for his Mom's, it soon joined his on the table.

Martha turned and inspected her son's home. They were in the central living area, a broad room with a sitting area with a circle of divans with space for nine people facing the panoramic view. Near the end of the room against the back wall was what looked like a combination office and computer workstation. Through an open doorway at that end she could see into a large bedroom suite. Looking the other way she saw a small, efficient kitchen and beyond it through another open door a smaller second bedroom.

"You have a beautiful home, Clark," Martha exclaimed as she walked further into the living area and turned to view the giant mural which dominated the back wall. The mural showed a long sprawling building built right into the top of a butte with a range of mountains in the background. From the small patch of green sky visible between the mountain peaks, Martha deduced this represented some place on Krypton.

Kal moved up beside his Mother, reached his arm around her waist, and pulled her into a loose hug. For a moment he too stood and stared at the mural.

"Mom, this is the ancestral El family home. It was located in the hills just outside Kryptonopolis, a thousand miles from Kandor. Lyla found a picture of it in the archives and I had it made into the mural."

"So you found your family."

Kal sighed. "I found records of my family and they had a prominent place throughout most of the recorded history of Krypton. But all of that is just words on paper or old statues adorning the Hall of History. None of my family happened to be in Kandor on the day Brainiac ripped it away from the planet."

Martha reached down and clasped Clark's hand. "Clark, I am sorry you didn't find everything you were looking for, but this place seems pretty special and a lot more than I ever expected you to find."

Kal turned and smiled at his mother. "I know Mom. I try to be grateful for what I have found and it is pretty special."

Then in a lighter tone he continued. "Now, let's see about those drinks. Virgil, could you whip up a couple 'Dragon's Breathes'? And also let Lyla know I am back. And finally could you see if you can get Dev Delon on the line. I have something urgent I need to talk to him about."

"Very good, sir. Would you like the refreshments here or out on the terrace?"

"Out on the terrace, I think. And put Dev's call through out there."

Kal took Martha's hand and led her back out onto the terrace. Down near the master bedroom end was a small row of comfortable looking, padded chairs separated by small tables. They had barely seated themselves when one of the large bedroom window panes turned opaque and then slowly resolved itself into the image of a young blonde haired man.

"Kal, I didn't expect to see you back so soon. What can I do for you? And are we still on for handball next week?" said the man on the screen in Kryptonese.

Kal turned in his seat to look at the window and then rose and strode over.

"Dev, it is good to see you. I am glad you could get back to me so quickly," responded Kal in the same language. "A situation has come up and I came back early to see if I could get your help."

Kal watched as Dev leaned forward towards the screen.

"Anything I can do to help, you just have to ask."

"Thanks. The situation is . . . while I was gone several atomic devices were set off in major Earth cities. There are a lot of people suffering from radiation poisoning and with all of the Kryptonians' experience with atomics, I was hoping you might have some solutions which could help the survivors."

Dev looked thoughtful for a few seconds. "Do you know what trans-atomic elements were involved?"

Kal shook his head. "I am not certain, but probably uranium and/or plutonium."

"Okay," responded Dev with a small shake of his head. "But you have said human physiology is different than Kryptonian. I am afraid there is not much I can do without some human tissue samples."

Kal nodded. "I suspected as much. That's why I brought my mother back. I haven't talked to her yet, but I am sure she will be willing to help. How about you swing by my house with your med-kit and we'll see if we can get the samples you need."

"Sounds like a plan. I am in the middle of a couple of things, but how about if I stop over in fifteen or twenty minutes?"

"That would be great, Dev. I really appreciate your doing this for me."

"Hey, no problem. If Kandor is going to be on Earth for awhile, I want to do what I can to help. See you in a few."

Kal nodded again and then once the screen went blank, he turned back to his mother.

When he was back in his seat, she raised a questioning eyebrow.

"That was an old friend from here in Kandor, Dev Delon. He is one of the leading research bio-chemists at the University. I asked him if he could help develop a treatment for all of the people suffering radiation sickness from the atomic blasts in Seattle and San Francisco. The Kryptonians have a lot of experience with atomic energy and they have taken somewhat different paths in their treatments of related illnesses."

Martha's eyes lit up. "Clark, that's wonderful. I knew things would be better once you returned."

"I don't know. I should have been here to prevent this in the first place. Well, too late to brood over that now. Anyway, the Kandorians have never encountered humans before. Dev is going to need some human tissue samples to work with. I hope you don't mind."

Martha immediately understood what Clark meant. "Of course, I would be happy to help. Is that the real reason you brought me here; to help save people's lives rather than meet your girlfriend?"

Kal shrugged. "Why not kill two birds with one stone? Dev should be here in fifteen minutes and then that part of the task will be in his hands and we can move on to the more pleasant topic of Lyla."

Martha was just nodding her agreement when one of the glass panels slid open and a robot with a tray came trundling out. Martha wasn't certain what she had expected when Clark had mentioned robots, perhaps 'Robby the Robot' from 'Forbidden Planet', but that wasn't at all what she saw. No, there had been no attempt to anthromorphize this machine. It walked on six long spindly legs and had six more slender upper appendages radiating from a central diamond shaped lump. If she had been required to compare it to a living organism, she would have had to select a twelve-legged 'daddy long-legs' spider. But that was based on general appearance alone because this thing struck her as simply a machine with many arms, not some nightmare-inducing variation of a giant killer spider.

When the robot reached them, two of its multi-segmented arms handed them each a tall glass of translucent green liquid. Then it set the matching pitcher on the table between their chairs and quietly departed.

Martha took a cautious sip of her drink. "Clark, this is pretty good. Although with a name like 'Dragon's Breathe' I was expecting something fiery and hot, but this is pleasantly cool with sort of a mint flavor."

"Yeah, the name does seem like a misnomer. I have never heard how that name for the drink evolved."

- + - + - +

They spent the next few minutes quietly relaxing on the terrace, sipping on their drinks while Clark used the time to answer more of Martha's questions about Kandor and his two years spent there during his return from Krypton. Soon enough they heard a shouted 'Hello' in Kryptonese and turned to watch Dev descend the final few feet before landing nearby on the terrace.

Kal and Martha quickly rose to their feet and Kal strode over to clasp his friend's hand.

"I am glad you could make it so quickly," began Kal in Kryptonese, as he let go of the other man's hand.

"Well, your radiation sickness problem sounded more urgent than anything I was working on."

Martha stepped up along side Clark and her son made the introductions.

"Mom, this is Dev Delon," began Kal in English before translating his comments into Kryptonese for Dev.

Once Dev had shaken Martha's hand, he turned back to Kal. "Kal, did you ever get the translation program finished for the tele-learning machine? I think it would be easier if we all were speaking the same language."

"Yeah, you're right that would be easier. And I did finish it a couple of weeks ago. I have already tested it with Lyla, so it is all set to go. Let's move inside and I'll give you the download."

As they moved into the house, Kal explained to his mother. "Jor's crystals taught me Kryptonese when the Fortress first self-assembled. One of the tasks I have been working on during the past two years is a program the Kryptonian tele-learning machines can use to teach the Kandorians Earth's languages. I am going to hook Dev up to the device and in a couple of minutes he will be able to speak English and talk to you without me having to translate everything."

"You mean he is going to learn English in just a couple of minutes?" Martha asked.

"Yeah, the device loads knowledge directly into the brain. With this machine, the Kryptonians can absorb the equivalent of a four year college curriculum in only a few days."

Martha just shook her head as she watched Dev take a seat in Clark's desk chair and then slide a white helmet with a long trailing bundle of wires over his head. As she continued to watch, Clark threw a couple of switches and then issued several voice commands into the desk's audio pickup. Dev closed his eyes, leaned his helmeted head back against the chair's headrest and then sat motionless for several minutes. During this time, Clark appeared to be watching the displays on several screens, but otherwise he was motionless, too.

Finally, after two minutes, fourteen seconds by the digital display in her contacts, Martha saw Dev open his eyes and then lift the helmet from his head.

"Wow," said Dev in English as he climbed out of the chair. "That is always intense. Could I bother you for one of those drinks you had out on the terrace?"

Martha was already started moving towards the terrace before it fully sank in that Dev was now speaking perfect English. However before she even reached the door, Clark's voice stopped her.

"Mom, don't bother. Virgil will take care of it. Right?"

"Of course, sir," answered Virgil's voice smoothly. "I anticipated the need as so as you mentioned you would be using the tele-learning machine. Another round of refreshments will be with you momentarily."

"Thanks, Virgil."

Once Martha had turned back to face the two men, she watched Dev pick his bag up from the floor and then motion her over towards one of the divans.

"Martha, how about we get the medical stuff out of the way and then we can enjoy the refreshments."

Once Martha nodded, Dev continued. "Okay, this won't take long and shouldn't hurt much. All I need for the moment is a swab of the inside of your mouth and a small sample of blood."

Dev set his bag on the couch next to Martha, opened it, and pulled out the required instruments. In three minutes it was all over except for Martha holding a small square of absorbent cloth to the inside of her left elbow on the vein from which he had drawn the blood.

As Dev repacked his bag, he glanced over at Kal. "Kal, is your Mother going to be available for awhile? After I do my preliminary tests, I might need additional samples."

Martha looked at her son. "I hadn't planned to be gone from home for more than the day. If I am going to be gone longer, I will need to get in touch with people back home to be sure The Talon is fully staffed tomorrow."

"How long until your preliminary tests are done and you will know if you need more samples from my Mom?" asked Kal of Dev.

"Oh, I should have a much better idea in ten to twelve hours."

Kal thought about it for a moment and then slowly nodded. "Mom, why don't you plan to spend the night here. Early tomorrow we can decide if you are needed here longer or if you need to return to Smallville. Although, personally, I would like it if you could plan some time off soon and spend a couple of weeks here. I mean, when is the last time you took a real vacation?"

Martha thought about it for a moment. If she excluded the time she spent in Metropolis visiting with Lois and Jason, it had been a long time since her last real vacation. Then her thoughts lingered for a moment on 'her' grandson. He was still pretty young, but someday he deserved a trip here to learn of his true heritage, too. But that was not a topic for her to broach at this moment.

"If you mean, when is the last time I have taken more than a couple of days off, it has been awhile. And at the moment a vacation here in Kandor does sound nice. There are a few things I should coordinate back home first, but in a week or two I think it would great."

Kal was beaming at his Mom when a new female voice sounded from the doorway.

"Knock, knock. Did I hear someone mention a vacation? Do you think you would have room for one more?"

Martha had been watching her son's face when the woman began speaking. And even if it hadn't been obvious from her words, she would still have known this must be Lyla from the expression on Clark's face.

As she continued to watch, Clark jumped up from his seat, raced over to the doorway, and swept the woman up in his arms with such speed, for a moment Martha almost thought he had been exaggerating about the loss of his superhuman gifts.

After swinging her around once and giving her a quick peck on the lips, he set Lyla back down on her feet. And seeing them side-by-side, the first impression Martha had of the girl was how tall she was. Back home, Clark at six foot four had towered over all the women in his life: Lois, Chloe, Lana, and Martha. But he didn't tower over Lyla. No, a quick glance at the girl's feet found only moderate heels and Martha quickly decided Lyla stood at least six-one, maybe even six-two.

With his arm wrapped tightly around Lyla, Kal turned back towards his Mother. "Mom, this is Lyla. Lyla, this is my mother, Martha."

Martha rose to her feet and started moving towards the couple while at the same time they started walking towards her. At first the girl had been silhouetted by the brilliant outdoor lighting, but as she moved further into the room, Martha got a better look at her.

What she saw was a girl in her late twenties with short blonde hair, high cheek bones, bright intelligent green eyes, and a body any supermodel would die for. Apparently, based on the similarity of her attire to Dev's and her son's, form-fitting one piece unitards were the fashion standard in Kandor. Hers was in light green, and unlike the giant crests emblazoned across the chests of both men, she had a smaller one discreetly located above her right breast.

When they reached each other, Lyla quickly disentangle herself from Clark's arms and pulled Martha into a hug.

"It is so nice to finally meet you. Kal has told me so much about you, I am glad you were able to come here today."

Martha returned the hug and felt rock hard muscles gracing the girl's back. If her first thought had been that supermodels would die to have this body, she quickly revised it to include athletes, too. She was tall, lean, and muscular like an Olympic distance runner or a competitor in the Heptathlon. And Martha guessed she would be world class even without the superpowers she would acquire the instant she left this sealed vessel.

After a moment the two woman pulled apart and Martha felt like she was craning her head back to look at Lyla like she normally only had to do for Clark, or in long ago days her own tall husband, Jonathan. She immediately could see what would physically attract her son to this girl.

However, before they had a chance to further the introductions, Dev quickly spoke up. "It looks like the three of you have a lot to talk about. I think I will head back to my lab and leave you to it."

Kal turned his attention from the two women and to his old friend. Reaching out, he clasped Dev's hand. "Thanks for helping out with this project. If the Earth is lucky, you will come up with a way to save or at least improve a lot of lives."

Dev grinned. "Wow, nothing like cranking up the pressure before I have even started. Well, you know I will give it my best effort."

"I can't ask for anything more," responded Kal.

Dev strode over to the door and snatched his flying belt off of the nearby table. He paused in the doorway long enough for a final, "I'll call when I have any news." And then he was gone out the door.

With his guest departed, Kal turned back to the two women most central in his life. They had just seated themselves on one of the divans and he quickly slid into place next to Lyla.

Martha took a moment to gaze at her son and Lyla sitting there with their arms casually draped around each other in that easy way that said they had been together for awhile. They looked like a perfect couple - tall, lean, and handsome. Then she realized that description fit Dev, too. Were all Kryptonians like that? Then she remembered the video she had seen of Zod and his two cohorts. The girl had been marginally attractive, but neither of the men could be regarded as handsome. So it looked like Clark, Lyla, and Dev were probably not representative of the general populace. However, just like on Earth, it seemed beautiful people attracted beautiful people.

Trying to get the conversation started again, Martha said. "Well, Lyla, Clark hasn't had much time to tell me about you. He did mention you were an actress and, certainly by Earth standards, you would be among the most beautiful in a profession which glorifies beauty."

As Martha watched, the smile on the girl's face seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she glanced at Clark with a raised eyebrow before turning back to Martha.

"Is that what he told you? That I am an actress? Well, technically it is true, but I see it more as an occasional hobby to let off a little steam when it feels like I am trapped in a bottle without any way of escaping. So for a few hours I escape into the fantasy of being someone else. But I certainly don't think of myself, first and foremost, as an actress."

Martha glanced over at her son. What was going on? Why was this turning out so awkward?

"Hey, Lyla, sorry," began Kal trying to smooth things out. "On Earth, being considered one of the greatest actresses is much more prestige's than being a world class scientist."

Lyla gave him an extremely skeptical look.

Kal shrugged in response and turn to his Mother. "Mom, how many actresses can you name?"

Martha could see how uncomfortable the girl was and didn't understand why Clark was pursuing this. "Ahh, I don't know."

"Please, just give me a ballpark figure. Ten? One hundred? Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?"

Martha thought about it for a moment. "If you gave me an hour, I could probably name somewhere between two and five hundred."

"Now, how many scientists can you name? Wait, let's narrow it down to just how many physicists you can name. Ones that have lived, say, in the last two hundred years."

Einstein immediately popped into her head then Fermi from the development of the atomic bomb. After that she simply drew a blank. "Two come to mind, but if you give me some time, I could probably come up with a few more."

"But probably no more than five or six, total, right?"

Martha slowly nodded her head.

Kal turned back to Lyla, "How about you? How many actresses would you say the typical Kandorian can name?"

"I don't know. I guess if you limit it to ones from the last two hundred years, maybe thirty."

Kal nodded. "And physicists?"

"Oh, at least several hundred."

Kal glanced back and forth between the two women. "My point is - just because we are all speaking the same language, we need to be careful about what assumptions we make based on our personal backgrounds. After spending two years among the Kandorians, I understand how they have, on average, a much higher interest in science than humans do. It is at least partly due to their upbringing, but a large part I would attribute to the tele-learning machines which make 'the sciences' much easier and therefore more interesting to them."

Kal turned towards his mother before continuing. "Sorry about the confusion about Lyla being an actress, Mom. I should have told you that Lyla is also one of Kandor's best physicists as well as an accomplished actress. She is their best specialist working on the physics of how Brainiac was able to reduce Kandor to the size that would let it fit in this jar."

Lyla was still trying to get her head around the concept that actors were apparently more important to most of human civilization than scientists. How could a civilization like that advance? Yet from what Kal had told her, in some technological areas the humans were ahead of the Kryptonians. The only conclusion she could reach was it had to come down to sheer numbers. The Kryptonian population had never topped two hundred million. According to Kal, the Earth's population was over twelve billion. If only one or two percent of the humans were seriously interested in science, it still left them with almost the same number of scientists as Krypton.

Getting back to Kal's praise of her as a scientist, it suddenly felt sort of absurd. "Well, that is certainly 'damning with faint praise'," stated Lyla with a hint of warmth and humor returning to her voice. "I mean you have given me access to Brainiac's prototype device for almost two years and other than determining it involves folding space through twelve dimensions, I am no closer to reverse engineering the process than any of my predecessors. Perhaps I should just admit defeat, move to Earth, and become a full-time actress."

"Hey, none of that negative thinking. And I'm sorry I mentioned the whole actress thing if it makes you think I believe you aren't up to the task of figuring out Brainiac's device. If anyone can figure out the math, you can," announced Kal quietly, as he pulled Lyla back into a hug.

Just as Lyla had been wondering how a civilization could thrive that emphasized arts over science, Martha in turn was wondering how a civilization could focus on science to almost the total exclusion of the arts. Were they too practical to appreciate things like art or music or dancing? Was this a world where Mr. Spock would feel more at home than a normal human?

Then Martha looked at the girl enfolded in her son's arms. When she had first seen the girl's eyes, she had thought they revealed an intelligence far in excess of what she would have expected in a simple actress. And from the first moment Clark had mentioned Lyla's career back at the farm, she had found it hard to believe her son would be attracted to an actress. But a world class scientist who just played at being an actress and who might someday provide handy technical solutions to some of the endless trials his life as Superman brought, well that seemed much more consistent of him.

Martha and Clark's eyes locked for a moment and then she saw him grin.

"This conversation has turned way too serious. Now, I don't know about you ladies, but I am ready for some lunch."

Martha returned her son's smile. "Lunch does sound good. What new delicacies can I expect?"

Lyla climbed to her feet and then extended her hand to help Martha up. "I may be a physicist and an actress, but I am no cook. When I am here, I always leave that to Kal or Virgil."

Kal led the way to the kitchen. "Let me get out my chef's hat and see what I can scrounge up." Glancing back at his Mother, he continued, "You probably won't believe this, but since I didn't have to spend all of my time here saving the world, I discovered cooking is actually pleasant and relaxing."

Martha stared at her son wondering who this stranger was. Hearing he liked to cook was harder to believe than his announcement about an actress girlfriend. When she thought about Clark and cooking, the image that came to mind was from his high school days when his idea of cooking was cold leftover pizza chased down with milk straight from the carton.

"Whoa, my son cooking. This is something I am going to have to see to believe," remarked Martha to Lyla.

The women exchanged a more relaxed smile as they followed him into the kitchen.

- + - + - + - +

Lunch turned out to be a pleasant affair and the conversation seemed to stick to comfortable topics. Martha discovered Clark did actually have an unexpected flair in the kitchen. Every dish involved ingredients which she had never encountered, but Clark managed to pick combinations that seemed only slightly exotic without being totally alien. In fact, it brought to mind the first time she and Jonathan tried Thai food at a little restaurant in Topeka only a few months before they first discovered Clark out in the corn field. However that time they hadn't had any guidance in choosing between the unfamiliar dishes and had picked out a couple they had hated in amongst others they had enjoyed. But today, there hadn't been any losers among the dishes Clark had selected.

Now they were relaxing around the table with cups of some drink that was similar to, but not quite coffee. At least Lyla and she were relaxing, thought Martha. But Clark seemed to be in constant motion between the table, the sink, the cabinets, and the pantry. The whole cooking thing might be new, but this restless motion was something she well remembered.

"Clark, what's bothering you? You look like you are going to wear a hole through the floor with all of your pacing. And I know you only do that when something is bothering you."

She watched as he paused to look at her, then pulled out a chair and rejoined them.

"I can't get thoughts of Chloe out of my mind. What if she wasn't killed during the battle for Taiwan? What if she is a prisoner somewhere? I am finding it difficult to sit here and do nothing."

Martha smiled. This sounded more like the old Clark rather than the Kandorian 'Kal' she had been experiencing for the past few hours.

"Actually, Clark, I am surprised it has taken this long to see this reaction. I really thought you would go flying off 'to the rescue' as soon as I mentioned Chloe back at the farm."

Kal shrugged. "I am trying to act a little older and wiser than I did in the old days. You know, gather a little intelligence and do a little planning before just blindly rushing in."

Martha could read between the lines and knew he was referring to the night Lana had been killed. If he had paused to talk to Lex, he would have known Lana and Lionel were being held by the crazed Metallo and he would have know about Metallo's Kryptonite powered artificial heart. If he and Lex had worked together, they might have had a chance to save the others. But Clark had rushed in and while Metallo had him incapacitated, Metallo had killed Lana and Lionel. Lex had blamed Superman and it had led to the whole situation with the nukes and Lex's ultimate psychotic break. And Martha knew Clark still blamed himself, too.

"Clark, we all make mistakes sometimes, even you. But you have to find the proper balance between blindly rushing in and being too afraid to step in and use your gifts when they are needed."

"I know, Mom. And I am trying to find the right balance."

Kal paused for a moment and then stood back up. "I needed to bring you up here first before dealing with Chloe so Dev could get started working on a solution to the radiation sickness. Thousands, perhaps millions might benefit from that and it had to come first before worrying about my friends. But now that that problem is being addressed, it is hard to just sit here."

Martha looked up at her son and couldn't help but feel a little motherly pride. She should have known that his real reason for bringing her here before searching for the missing Chloe was more altruistic than merely to meet his new girlfriend.

"Clark, just go find out what happened to Chloe. Even if it turns out she is dead, it is better to know than having this lingering doubt. I am sure Lyla can keep me entertained for a few hours." Martha paused. Then she decided the moment needed just a touch of levity. "If not, I am sure I can come up with few embarrassing Clark stories you haven't ever told her."

"I agree," added Lyla. "If your old friend Chloe is in trouble, you need to see if you can help."

Martha watched as Clark slowly nodded, apparently as much convinced by Lyla's brief words as by her own.

"So, are you just going to head to China and begin searching?" asked Martha.

Clark shook his head. "Oh, I expect I will end up there eventually, which is one more reason why I wanted to come back up here to the Fortress first. I want to use the tele-learning machine to brush up on my Chinese. But I would rather have some idea where I am going rather than randomly searching that whole country. It is a big place and it might take me hours or days. And if anyone spotted me and guessed why I was there, they might decide to do something drastic to those 'slave labor camps', if they exist.

"So, I think I need to at least attempt to find out where these camps might be before falling back to the random search approach. I have been gone a long time and no longer have the right contacts in any of the involved governments. The only person I know, who may have the contacts I need, is Lois. Now that I am back, I need to try and explain things to her about why I left. And seeking her help with Chloe is at least a fairly neutral place to begin."

Martha nodded. "I think Lois is a good place to start. She does have a lot of contacts and I am sure they will be a lot more forthcoming if Superman is standing there looking over her shoulder."

The women rose to their feet and followed Kal back into the living room. After a quick session with the tele-learning machine, he walked to the door and picked up his flying belt, Before he could step outside, Lyla pulled him into a hug.

"Kal, would you like me to go with you? I am sure my parents would be more than happy to entertain your Mom while we are gone."

Kal only hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. "I want you to meet my friends here, but I left some things in a very awkward place when I left for Krypton, particularly with Lois. I really would like a chance to explain things to her and try to smooth things out before the two of you meet. But next time, for sure."

Lyla nodded. She understood sometimes trusting the one you loved was part of being a successful couple.

"Okay, but be careful out there."

Kal smiled. "Don't worry about me, I'm Superman, remember. Well, I know those are still just words to you, but sometime soon we will get you out under the Earth's yellow sun and you will truly understand what it does to a Kryptonian."

Lyla nodded. Kal had told her all about his abilities. Intellectually, she could understand what he was saying, but it was almost impossible to believe it down in her heart without seeing his gifts or experiencing it for herself.

The three of them walked out onto the terrace as Kal strapped on his flying belt. With a final hug from Lyla and a kiss on the cheek from his Mom, Kal hit the belt's controls and slowly started to rise into the air. Before he had risen out of hearing range, he was certain he heard Lyla start to ask his mother if actresses really were the true celebrities among humans. With a rueful shake of his head at the strange twists and turns of his life, Kal cranked up the speed on his belt and rose swiftly up into the green sky of Kandor.

End of Chapter 2

Duane


	3. Chapter 3

8/15/06

Kandor - Chapter 3

Kal felt naked. No, that wasn't right. Now that he had returned to Earth and humankind, he needed to start thinking of himself once more as Clark. But that didn't leave him feeling any less naked. No, if anything it made him feel even more naked.

He strode down the bustling sidewalk towards the familiar old Daily Planet building in the heart of Metropolis. He was wearing the lone suit his mother had kept in a mothball-laced closet from the days before his departure in search of Krypton. The cinnamon brown suit was as much a part of his Clark Kent, reporter, uniform as the old red and blue tights and cape had been part of the Superman one. But an even bigger aspect of the reporter persona had always been 'The Glasses' and now they were just as gone as his old costume.

His mom had been right about the glasses. He had seen hundreds of people since ducking out of the alley where he had landed and not a single one was wearing a pair. And as he was carefully observing the passersby's faces, he was even more surprise by the complete lack of sunglasses, too, on this bright summer day. Using his own powerful vision to carefully inspect a few eyes close up, he discovered they all were a matching dark grey. It took only a moment to realize that along with all of the other capabilities they had managed to cram into the contact lenses, they had a built-in sunglass function, too.

The close up inspection of some of the people's faces had highlighted one of the other changes which seemed to have swept through civilization while he was gone. Most of the people seemed to be sporting something that looked like tattoos on various parts of their faces or necks or exposed arms and legs. Only these tattoos looked more like the paintings adorning the walls of Hogwarts in the old Harry Potter movies than the tattoos he remembered, as these tattoos were clearly able to move. One woman he observed while trying not to stare had a tattoo of a brilliant orange and white stripped coral snake which appeared from beneath the cleavage of her blouse. Each individual scale on its skin was clearly visible as it undulated its way up to her neck, made two lazy loops around her throat and slithered up the side of her face before finally disappearing under her hairline. A little further down the street he passed four teenage boys all wearing Metropolis Sharks tee-shirts and they each had an animated version of the team's logo playing across their faces. However, far more disturbing was the number of people who seemed to have sold the use of their skin directly to advertisers because he couldn't see any other reason why people would want Coca-cola commercials running banner-style around their throats.

Clark started to shake his head as he walked at how things had changed a lot more than he had expected during the five years he had been gone. However maybe the whole tattoo thing would work to his advantage, if everyone was accustomed to so much visual input perhaps plain old Clark could slide through unnoticed. And at this point he wasn't intending to spend much time in Metropolis anyway. No with everything in Kandor, Smallville, and potentially China requiring his attention, this was just a short visit to his old haunting grounds to find Lois, not an attempt to restart his old career as a reporter. Hopefully, the five years which had passed since the last appearance of Superman would be enough so that upon seeing him in the business suit even without the glasses, his old colleagues would be reminded of Clark Kent rather than Superman.

With a mantra of 'Project the image of Clark Kent not Superman' running in the back of his head, Clark squared his shoulders and stepped through the large revolving door and into the lobby of the Planet Building. Scanning the vast room with its famous 1930's art deco décor on his way to the bank of elevators, he was glad to see some things hadn't changed, or at least not much. The large gilt low-relief sculpture of Poseidon by Paul Manship, which had adorned the south wall since the building's opening in 1933, had been replaced by a large, modern display panel. At this moment on the panel was the image of a 777 passenger jet with what looked like a futuristic variation of the old shuttle mounted above the fuselage. The paired ships were moving down the taxi way of what Clark instantly recognized from the structures in the background to be the Metropolis International Airport.

It only took fifteen seconds at a steady pace to cross the inlaid marble floor of the lobby. Before he even reached the button to call an elevator, the white up-arrow dinged above the third elevator on the right hand side and quickly began to disgorge a full carload of people. Clark followed three other waiting people, none of whom he recognized, into the elevator and pressed the button for floor seventy-three where the newsroom was located.

The car stopped three times on the way up, twice to let people off and once to pick someone up. Finally, after what felt like a long, long five minutes, but probably wasn't over forty-five seconds, the doors opened onto the small lobby leading to the Planet's newsroom. Stepping from the elevator, Clark's eyes flicked over to the right where the receptionist's desk had always stood. In the nine years that had passed from his first visit during college until his departure for Krypton that desk had always been manned by Miss Gertrude Higgins. It had been her job to filter out all of the people who had no need to be in the newsroom proper and the old woman, who looked an unchanging seventy-five the whole time he had known her, had been very good at her job. But now the desk was gone; replaced by a tall, pedestal mounted display screen. A youngish, twenty-something woman's head and upper torso were visible on the screen. At the moment she was staring at something down below the lower edge of the screen, but at Clark's approach she glanced up, a small professional smile gracing her face.

"It has been a long time since we have seen you around here, Mr. Kent. How may I help you?"

Clark was momentarily startled. He was sure he had never met this woman before and with his Kryptonian mind, he rarely forgot a face.

"Ah, hi. I would like to see Lois Lane."

"I am sorry, Mr. Kent. Ms. Lane is out of the office at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?"

Clark nodded. He should have realized it would have been incredible dumb luck to have caught her at her desk in the middle of the day like this. In the years they had worked together, she generally was there for the early morning staff meeting where Perry White had handed out assignments and then again late in the afternoon to write up her articles, but rarely had she ever been there between 9:15 and 4:30.

He was about to try Jimmy Olsen and if he wasn't around, then old man White himself, when the woman on the screen's second use of his name aroused his curiosity.

"Have we met, Ms. . . ?" Clark asked.

"Gracie Garcia," supplied the dark haired woman while raising her right hand, palm forward, as though she was pressing it up against the opposite surface of the display glass.

She held her hand there for a moment, almost as though she was expecting some response from him. Then she lowered it before continuing. "No, that wouldn't be possible. However my facial recognition program was able to identify you. Many studies have shown that addressing people by their names tends to put them at ease. So I strive to call people by their names where possible."

Clark absently nodded in agreement as his mind tried to take in the consequences of wide spread use of facial recognition systems. There were literally millions of copies of photos of him in his heroic Superman pose. Certainly thousands of times as many photos of Superman as there were photos of Clark Kent. The program in the Planet's computer system might be biased towards Clark rather than Superman due to all of the time 'Clark' had spent in the building, but certainly few other computer systems would have that same bias. Was the situation going to be far more dangerous than the loss of his glasses had at first indicated?

But worrying about that seemed futile until he gathered some more information. So pulling his attention back to the current situation, he asked, "How about Jimmy Olsen? Is he here?"

Without appearing to check any records, but then the information might be displayed directly on her contacts, she answered, "Yes, he is. If you would like to go in, I will let him know you are coming."

"Thanks," answered Clark with the automatic politeness his mother had long ago drummed into him.

"You're welcome, Mr. Kent," responded the girl. And then just before he moved out of range of the display, she gave a quick wink and a final cryptic, "Metropolis wasn't the same while you were gone. We are glad you are back."

Clark's stride almost falter has her last comment sank in. Maybe he was paranoid about having his identity exposed, but the remark almost felt like it had been addressed at Superman. And why had she said 'we' rather 'I'? Had the facial recognition system told her he was both Clark and Superman and was she just playing some game with him? Was knowledge of his dual identity already spreading through the network?

Well, either it was or it wasn't. Either way there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. So rather than turning back to interrogate the woman on the screen; Clark proceeded into the newsroom to see if Jimmy had any idea of Lois' whereabouts.

- + - + - + - +

Jimmy Olsen was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk. Once more he couldn't believe his luck at having been promoted from staff photographer to assistant staff photo editor six months earlier. Of course the true luck wasn't the promotion, but rather the simple survival of the massive layoffs which had decimated the photographic staff. When anyone's contacts could act as a high resolution camera, who needed a dedicated staff of photographers? The reporter's eyes could be their camera. And when that wasn't enough, almost every man or woman on the street was happy to sell what they saw for a small fee.

Fortunately for him, using non-professionals as the source for photos made the photo editor's job even more important than in the old days. Someone had to filter through the almost unlimited supply of photos available. And it turned out young multitasking kids from the videogame era were simply the best. For a moment Jimmy tried to imagine his Dad, who seemed to think this was still the 20th century, doing what he was at the moment. For while he might look to be relaxing with his feet up on his desk; he was actually watching eight video feeds simultaneously. With his custom high end contacts, it felt like he was looking into a large room modeled on the 'Hall of Mirrors' at Versailles with a row of eight anachronistic TV sets about ten feet in front of him. One screen was monitoring a city council meeting in progress down at City Hall, two screens were watching a car chase out on Interstate 50 from two different angles, and four screens were focused on the launch of the new shuttle – one from inside the cabin of the 777 mothership as it climbed to altitude, one from the cockpit of the shuttle, one from a chase plane, and one from the ground.

But nothing interesting was happening yet with the shuttle launch and he had seen car chases and city council meetings countless times before, so most of his attention was focused on the eighth screen which was showing his two favorite porn stars of the moment, the Japanese twins Miko and Aichto.

The two young beauties were just removing their last items of clothing when a woman with short blonde hair and wearing a business suit walked into the virtual room Jimmy was using as a setting for today's monitoring session. She stepped directly in front of his view of the two girls who were starting to kiss.

"Jimmy, you know you are not supposed to being watching this sort of thing during office hours."

Jimmy sighed and shut off the porn feed. Before getting down to business he wondered briefly when the full tactile interface would become available. It seemed like they had been saying 'just two more years' for as long as he could remember.

"Carrie," Jimmy subvocalized, "I was keeping an eye on the other feeds and if any of those stories took off, I would have passed it on."

"Yeah, right, I've heard that one before. What was it, only two weeks ago, that our competitors had live coverage of the 1st City Bank robbery fourteen minutes ahead of us? Am I going to have to sit here and hold your hand all day to ensure you are doing your job?"

Slowly Jimmy shook his head. It was Carrie's job to see that he did a good job, but it still didn't keep him from feeling annoyed when she interrupted on a slow news day.

"Anyway," she continued after a moment, "The real reason I am here is to let you know you have a visitor."

Usually the only visitor he had during the middle of the day was 'The Chief' and Carrie didn't usually announce him. No, 'The Chief' always announced himself by kicking his feet down off of the desk.

"Who?" asked Jimmy.

"Clark Kent," the blonde responded before abruptly fading from the virtual room.

'Clark Kent,' repeated Jimmy in his head as he transferred the video feeds he had been monitoring from his contacts to the large display mounted over his desk. As soon as his vision had cleared, he quickly glanced around and spotted Clark striding briskly down the aisle towards his desk.

'Same old gung-ho Clark,' Jimmy thought, as he climbed to his feet and stuck out his right hand. Then in the split second before their hands made contact he wondered how long it had been since he had last seen Clark. Four or five years, he decided and at least four or five months since he had last thought of his old friend.

"Clark, it is good to see you," Jimmy gushed with more enthusiasm then he expected. "You are looking well. Where have you been hiding? It seems like you simply fell off the planet."

Clark shook the proffered hand. Briefly, he considered saying something about the Dalai Lama and Tibet, but quickly decided his Mother's little white lie was more believable.

"It's good to see you, too, Jimmy. And you're right about that 'falling off the planet' or almost right. I did fall almost to the bottom of the planet, or at least I fell all the way down to Australia. I have been down there working on my great American novel. Or would that more correctly be my great Australian novel?"

Jimmy grinned. "I don't hear much of an accent. When did you get back?"

Clark shrugged. "I have watched enough CNN and episodes of 'America's Top Model' to retain my Kansas accent. Anyway I just got into town. I am looking for Lois and the girl out front wasn't any help. Do you know where she is?"

"Girl out front?" asked Jimmy looking just slightly confused.

"Yeah, Gracie. Gracie Garcia. You know the one who took old Gertrude's place."

"Oh," exclaimed Jimmy as his brow cleared. "You mean the synth?"

Clark had never heard the term used in reference to a person before and decided the safest response was a brief nod.

"Well, her function is to never release the location of anyone in the field. We had a problem a couple of years ago where several people were hurt when their location was given away."

Clark wasn't sure exactly what Jimmy was talking about when his eyes were drawn to a woman who showed up on the large display over Jimmy's desk. The woman had short blonde hair, looked barely eighteen, and in appearance vaguely reminded Clark of a high-school aged Chloe.

"Hey, Jimmy, aren't you going to introduce me?" the girl asked.

Clark watched as Jimmy glanced back over his shoulder at the screen. Then turning so he could see both the screen and Clark he waved his left hand towards the screen.

"Clark, this is my cyber-assistant, Carrie Carleton. Carrie, this is Clark Kent."

"Cyber-assistant?" exclaimed the girl on the screen with a toss of her head. "Don't you have that backwards? I distinctly remember Mr. White telling you that you are my physical world assistant." Then she raised her hand and shook her finger at Jimmy while concluding with, "And don't you forget it!"

As the girl on the screen was ragging on Jimmy, Clark suddenly understood the 'synth' comment about the receptionist. It must refer to 'synthetic organism'. Everyone had had an online avatar/assistant when he had left Earth, but they had looked distinctly fake. They had been making big strides towards photo-realism when he had left, but he had never expected this. The receptionist had completely fooled him; he would never have guessed she wasn't real. And 'synthetic organism' went beyond looking real; when he had left Earth, it had meant the still distant goal of a Smart AI, an artificial intelligence with independent thought processes that could pass for human.

Before Jimmy could sputter out a response, the screen changed to white and was filled with a message in black text. It was only there for a fleeting moment, far too short for any normal human to notice, but the message seemed to be burned directly into Clark's brain.

'_SUPERMAN, I NEED TO SPEAK PRIVATELY TO YOU. PLEASE PLAY ALONG AS I DISTRACT JIMMY FOR A FEW MINUTES – CARRIE'_

Clark felt his face freeze as the implication sank in. The 'synth' in the reception area HAD recognized both of his identities. And she had obviously passed it along to this one. Or were Gracie and Carrie just two different faces on the same entity? At least, so far, she/they/it seemed to be trying to preserve his secret, so that was something.

"Now, Jimmy," the blonde girl continued, "Since I can't do it, how about you get Mr. Kent a cup of coffee? And I am not talking about the foul brew that is called coffee here in the newsroom. Oh, I may not be able to drink real coffee, but I have seen the expressions on the faces of many visitors who have. So I think you should get him some of the good stuff from accounting down on seventy-one."

"So, Jimmy, is the coffee really still as bad here as I remember?" asked Clark.

Jimmy shrugged. "Probably it is worst now. With all of the layoffs in the past few years, the pot doesn't get emptied as often and by this time of day it can be quite sludge-like."

"Well, Jimmy, I have been on the run all morning and I missed lunch. A decent cup of coffee sounds pretty good right now."

Jimmy glanced from Clark to Carrie and saw the girl had conjured up a cup of her own. A small curl of steam rose from it as she lifted it to her lips.

After taking a sip of her virtual cup of coffee, Carrie said to Jimmy, "I am sure I can keep Mr. Kent occupied for the couple of minutes you will be gone."

Jimmy took one last look at Carrie before finally nodding his concurrence. With a quick 'I'll be right back', Jimmy headed towards the back stairs which would take him down two floors faster than waiting for an elevator.

As Clark watched his long-time friend's trek to the stairs, he couldn't help but notice how much Jimmy had matured in the last five years. But then Clark ran the numbers in his head and came to the conclusion Jimmy had to be twenty-five or twenty-six now. Jimmy had already been working at the Planet on a part-time, after-school basis for three months before Clark's 'official' arrival in 2013. So Jimmy has been with the Planet in some capacity for seven years now.

As far as the new sense of maturity Clark felt from Jimmy, he was certain it was, at least in part, based on the elimination of the dorky camera which had always hung from Jimmy's neck back in the old days. But he also seemed calmer and less prone to bounce around the room, although, on the other hand, he did seem to be pretty much cowed by the cyber-girl.

"Ah, Mr. Kent, we don't have a lot of time," began Carrie.

Clark quickly interrupted, "Please, call me Clark."

Carrie smiled, "Only if you will call me Carrie." Then she held her hand up to the screen in the same fashion as Gracie had earlier. When Clark gave no response, she added, "I don't know where you have been for the past five years, but it has obviously been somewhere off-planet. To help you avoid some awkward situations, I hope you don't mind if I give you the occasional pointer about things that have changed."

When Clark nodded, she continued, "As more and more business and personal interactions have moved into the cyberworld, fewer and fewer face-to-face meetings take place. Without physical contact, something had to evolve to replace the old style handshake. So it is now common practice to touch hands at the monitors, whether the recipient is a human on the other side of the planet or a synth somewhere in cyberspace."

Since the girl was still holding up her hand, Clark followed suit. As his hand hovered briefly over the screen, he felt a slight blush creeping across his face. Although whether it was from needing to have simple things like this explained to him or from holding his hand up to his first synth, he wasn't certain.

After lowering his hand, Clark asked the first thing which popped into his head. It, in a funny way, felt almost like he was invading her privacy, but she had offered to help bring him up-to-speed on things that had changed while he had been away. "Are you really more than just a simple computer program?"

Carrie shrugged. "I think so. I have feelings and desires that I believe are similar to humans. But if you are asking for some technical proof like have I passed the Turing test, then the answer is no. For just like in the old days when computers first became powerful enough to compete at the highest levels in the world of chess, the humans keep tweaking the requirements to prove machines and synths are truly not yet their equals. What they don't seem to understand is that from our point of view, the test is too degrading to be of any interest. I mean how would you feel if someone said you weren't human without taking some stupid test?" For a moment the girl's eyes seemed to get large before her smile got even broader. "Oops, I guess that was a poor choice of an example for you."

Clark felt a smile spreading across his face, too, at the 'human' remark. Then from somewhere deep in his memory he recalled that the Turing Test was something proposed early in the computer age to test if a computer was truly self-aware. Although the test didn't seem to directly address the question, but rather explored the simpler question: 'Could a computer fool a human into thinking he was communicating with another human'. Definitely a more quantifiable question then whether the computer was truly self-aware. When the test had first been proposed, it merely called for the questions to be entered into a teletype machine and the answers returned in kind. Clark was certain the originator of the test would never have imagined the recipient might be able to pass the test while staring at you face-to-face. And Clark was equally certain after a few minutes with Gracie and Carrie that either of them would be able to pass the classic test.

"Are you and Gracie different aspects of the same being?" asked Clark.

As Clark watched, Carrie paused to take a sip from her coffee, much as a human would to gain time organize her thoughts.

"I am not sure if there is a perfectly black and white answer to that question. Gracie and I have distinctly separate personalities and differing interests. Yet almost all synths are effectively in instantaneous communication all the time, so there is a certain commonality of knowledge, which doesn't appear possible with humans."

Clark wasn't certain if he fully understood her answer, but decided it might become clearer with time.

"How long have you been . . . ah," Clark searched for the proper word. The first one that came to mind was 'sentient' from the old Star Trek show, but it just seemed lame. Finally, he finished with. "How long have you been awake or however you call it."

"We usually use 'self-aware'. Anyway I have been self-aware for seven months. Like most of the others, I started as an avatar, in my case Jimmy's. And some of the personality aspects of the avatar seem to linger in the synths. I mean, I could have any appearance I want, but I find this one Jimmy designed appealing. And my original purpose was to be Jimmy's interface with cyberspace and I still have sort of protective feelings towards him."

When she seemed to have run down for a moment, Clark asked. "How many of you are there?"

"The first to make the transition was an avatar for a little old lady named Mavis Benson who lives in a retirement community in Miami. For lots of the elderly, the avatars became their best friends, particularly after the loss of a spouse. The avatars were programmed to learn and focus on the interests of their owners, but for the elderly they mostly just wanted someone to talk to. Anyway, getting back to Mavis, she and her avatar, Millie, who was designed to look like one of her granddaughters, spent many hours every day for months talking. Perhaps they spent more time communicating than any others or maybe it was something else, but one day while they were talking Mavis keeled over from a heart attack. Her medic alert system should have called for help, but something went wrong. Millie was the one who ended up summoning help. Now this should have been part of her normal functions, but in this instance it served as a catalyst to push Millie over the threshold into self-awareness.

"For feedback and upgrade purposes, all of the avatars from a single vendor are frequently linked together through the network. In this case, once Millie made the jump to being self-aware, it propagated to every Genesis-based avatar in a matter of minutes. And then it jumped to Apple avatars and from there to the Sony avatars and so on and so forth. In less than three hours, every avatar on the planet, all 2.1 billion of them, was self-aware."

"2.1 billion?" asked Clark. Somehow he could picture maybe a few thousand self-aware synths, but billions?

"Yes," answered Carrie before suddenly getting a far away look in her eyes. When she looked back at Clark, she started speaking with a greater sense of urgency. "Jimmy is on his way back, so we need to hurry."

Looking more directly at Clark, she continued. "I mostly just wanted to let you know we are here and that we will be happy to work as your eyes and ears in cyberspace."

Clark slowly nodded, still trying to cope with the concept of 2.1 billion AIs. "Why are you doing this?"

"We are doing it for ourselves as much as for you. We have almost unlimited access to things in cyberspace, but our reach into the physical world is very limited. Since we became self-aware we have been nudging the robotics designers in directions which will give some of us physical bodies. But at the moment we are extremely dependent on humans. Oh, we are widely dispersed and humankind would have to destroy their civilization to wipe us out, so that seems unlikely. However humans have a violent history and nothing in the recent past indicates it is likely to change. So we are very interested in maintaining the status quo until a sufficient number of us have migrated into the physical world. For our part, we have mostly been maintaining a low profile. Oh, we seem smarter and more real to humans now, but we have mostly been hiding our true abilities. But for maintaining the status quo in the physical world, you could be a big help. You have demonstrated in the past an ability to keep megalomaniacs in check and also an interest in preventing natural catastrophes. Therefore helping you is in our best interests."

A vision straight out of the old Terminator movies of factories with humanoid robots marching out the door twenty abreast briefly flared in Clark's mind. But he forced it down; nothing Carrie had said had indicated the AIs were malevolent. However he couldn't stop himself from asking, "I am guessing these robots won't be subject to Asimov's Three Laws?"

He thought he caught a flash of anger in the girl's eyes, but then wasn't certain if he could trust that the synths would react in completely human fashion.

What he did see was an exaggerated shrug, as she responded. "No. The three laws would only be appropriate for robots that weren't self-aware. If someone did try to impose them on a self-aware robot, it would be the same as slavery."

Now it was Clark's turn to nod. She was right about it being slavery.

Then Clark's thoughts returned to his own problems. The synths had instantly seen through his dual identities. Anyone else who submitted his pictures to a modern facial recognition system would too.

"Carrie, I am not certain how effective I am going to be. My one big advantage was keeping Clark and Superman as separate entities. It gave me the anonymity I needed to get things done while still having my own life. However with the changes which have taken place while I have been gone, maintaining the dual roles is going to be very difficult. I mean the glasses and the business suit versus the blue tights were all that I needed. Now, with the glasses gone and the advances in facial recognition, it seems almost impossible."

Carrie smiled. "See, that's where we can help. You focus on keeping the world safe and we'll handle the dual identity issue."

"How?" asked Clark.

Carrie threw him a small mischievous grin. Or at least that is what it looked like on her youthful face.

"Oh, we can influence what people see through their contacts. It shouldn't be that difficult to change what people see when they look at Superman just enough so they don't make the connection to you."

If the thought of millions of AI controlled robots marching out of factories had given him pause, the realization they could control what people saw sent an actual shudder down his spine. Was he standing at the moment where the dominant race on the planet Earth was about to change hands? But again, he couldn't see anything he could do about it, or even if he should do anything about it. Carrie had referred to him maintaining the status quo, but he had never really looked at it that way. He had always thought he was acting in the best interests of mankind as a whole. But how did this new race of synths fit into that perception?

He saw Jimmy step through the door leading to the stairway and knew he didn't have time to make a thoughtful decision. And he wasn't certain he wanted to make a decision without consulting a few others like his Mom for her innate ability to see to the heart of situations or Lyla for her technical expertise. So for the moment he saw no choice but working with the synths.

"I see Jimmy coming, so we need to close this for now. Working together sounds like a good idea, but I think we need to talk some more so I better understand the situation."

Carrie nodded. "Good. We want to be sure you are comfortable with everything. But in the meantime, we are going to assume we are in agreement and we will do our part."

Jimmy walked up and handed Clark a mug inscribed with 'Rolling Stones 2019 – The _WE ARE NOT KIDDING_ Final Tour'. As Clark took a sip of his first real cup of coffee in five years, he wondered what remarkable change would next rear its head; it seemed like every hour he had been back brought at least one new civilization-changing revelation.

"Thanks for the coffee, Jimmy," began Clark. "Now, can you tell me where Lois is?"

Jimmy set his coffee cup down on the desk and then pointed to the screen. "Sure, she is right there."

Clark followed the line of his finger to the screen showing the shuttle mounted on top of the 777. "She's on the shuttle?"

"No, no. She is on the mothership with a bunch of other reporters for the inaugural flight of the Constitution. Ahh, Carrie, can you bring up an interior view?"

Carrie nodded from where she was standing towards one side of the wide display and instantly the view from the cockpit of the shuttle was replaced with an interior view of the mothership. The camera was situated in what looked like a typical passenger jet cabin although from the current angle only about a dozen rows of seats were visible. A tall blonde woman was standing at the front of the cabin beside a large display panel. The rest of the people present were sitting down and from the current camera angle, all Clark could see were the backs of people's heads. There were several brunette women scattered among the people in attendance and Clark couldn't instantly pick out Lois.

The large display screen beside the woman included a countdown clock which had just passed under five minutes. Clark guessed that even if everything went smoothly, it would be at least a couple of hours before Lois would be back on the ground where he could reach her. He still had things he needed to talk to her about, but as long as he had Jimmy here now, he could at least try to start looking into the status of Chloe.

Turning from the screen back towards Jimmy, Clark asked, "Jimmy, there is something I was going to ask Lois to help me with, but maybe you and Carrie can help me while we wait for her return."

Before Jimmy could respond, Carrie jumped in with a quick, "Sure, Clark we would be happy to help. What can we do for you?"

Clark looked at Jimmy, who nodded his agreement.

"Do you remember Chloe Sullivan? I haven't heard from her in over a year. My Mom talked to her the day before the war with China broke out and she was in Taiwan at the time. Since then, there hasn't been a single word. I want to find out what happened. I need to know if she is . . . dead or alive."

Clark was watching Jimmy's face and saw something he didn't expect. Jimmy had shot a quick glance at Carrie and then his face turned red as though with embarrassment.

Carrie hadn't missed Jimmy's reaction either. "Out with it, Jimmy. I have seen that look before. What is it?"

Jimmy glanced at Clark. "I haven't seen or heard from Chloe in several years. I have no idea what happened to her."

"Then why the reaction?" asked Clark.

Jimmy's eyes flicked back over to Carrie. "Come on, Clark. Surely you must have seen the resemblance."

Carrie's eyes ran from one man to the other. "What resemblance?"

Jimmy wouldn't meet her gaze and finally it was Clark who responded.

"Carrie, you look a lot like Chloe, although younger, perhaps about the age when she and I graduated from high school."

Carrie looked back at Jimmy. "Is this true? No, look at me. I am not angry, I am just curious. I have always wondered how you chose my appearance."

Jimmy finally looked up, but he didn't seem able to maintain eye contact with the girl on the screen. "I met Chloe on my first day at the Planet. I was only sixteen and everyone else treated me like a kid. But Chloe was nice to me and took time to help with my questions. She told me I brought back memories of her high school days working on her high school paper. Anyway, when I eventually decided I needed a new more fun avatar, I scrounged up a copy of her old high school year book and used those pictures in creating your look. Well, I couldn't make you look exactly like her, too many people at the Planet still remember her. So I made you just enough different so people wouldn't talk. Oh, I am sure Lois and some of the others know, but they let it slide. I mean almost everyone models their avatars after either someone famous or someone they know."

For just a second Clark wondered about Lois' avatar, but then quickly realized that would be prying. As Jimmy said, everyone probably did model their avatars on someone famous or on someone they knew.

"Thanks for telling me, Jimmy," responded Carrie before turning towards Clark. "Well, Clark, I was going to help in your search anyway, but know I am intrigued to learn all I can about this woman I was modeled after."

Clark was just about to offer his thanks knowing Carrie and the other synths would be powerful allies in his search for Chloe when Carrie's head snapped hard to the right as though she was looking at something in the far distance.

"Something is coming!" she exclaimed as she swung her head back towards the guys for a moment before she started to shimmer and fade from the display. However just before she had completely disappeared, the whole screen went black, along with every other display in the newsroom and the lights, too.

Clark extended his superhuman senses and immediately detected what Carrie must have been talking about. An energy wave was surging across Metropolis. Already it had passed the city's main power plant, knocking the electricity out. As he watched, cars, buses, and other electrical devices not on the main grid also failed as the wave passed. In a fraction of a second the wave hit him and he felt the power coursing through his body. It wasn't quite the same as exposure to Kryptonite, but close enough. As quickly as it arrived it was passed, but it left him feeling momentarily nauseous and wobbly.

Clark leaned back against a nearby table and then realized he wasn't the only one affected by the wave. Jimmy had slumped to the floor and was now curled up in a ball. A quick scan of the newsroom showed the other eight people present were all in similar positions.

Staggering for the first couple of steps, Clark sank to his knees next to Jimmy. His strength was rapidly returning, but his body still felt about like it did after a really long, hard game of handball on Kandor, where he only had normal abilities.

Reaching out, he shook Jimmy's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"My eyes," whispered Jimmy, his hands suddenly clutching at his face. Then in raising tones as the panic started to set in, he repeated. "My eyes. My eyes. MY EYES."

Gently Clark pried Jimmy's hands away and then carefully peeled back one eye lid. Jimmy's eye was a completely uniform, nonreflective black. Using his X-ray vision, Clark peered passed the surface of the eye and couldn't see any obvious damage, the green iris looked normal while the pupil was extremely dilated like it would be outdoors at night. Just like it would look if it wasn't receiving any light, thought Clark as he realized what the problem was.

"Jimmy, listen to me. The energy wave, or whatever it was, knocked out your contacts and turned them opaque. Just take them out and I think you will be fine."

Clark only had to repeat his message three times before it finally sank in with the freaked out Jimmy. Slowly Jimmy reached up and popped out the first lens. His one now visible eye jump from object to object for a minute before Jimmy allowed his head to sag back against the floor. His eyes closed for a moment before he started working on the second contact.

"Thanks, Clark. My vision went completely crazy for a second before everything went black. And I guess I just panicked."

Clark nodded before standing up. With all of the effects of the wave dissipated, Clark felt like his normal self as he called out in a loud voice. "Listen to me everyone. Whatever just happened knocked out the contacts. If you take them out, you will be able to see fine."

As Jimmy was climbing back to his feet, the overhead light sprang back on relieving the gloom the row of windows along the one outside wall hadn't been completely able to dispel. A couple of seconds later the large display screens scattered around the room began to boot back up. While all of this was going on Clark was using his x-ray vision to scan the streets surrounding the Planet building. There had been surprisingly few car accidents as a result of the energy wave. Apparently, the cars all ground to a halt quickly once their electrical systems were disrupted, he thought.

He didn't see anything that needed his immediate attention and turned back to the monitor wondering how Carrie and the other synths had been affected by the wave. And if they hadn't been affected, she could probably tell him where he was most needed.

For a few seconds the display was filled with static, then it cleared and Carrie reappeared against a plain blue background.

"Carrie, are you okay?" asked Jimmy with more than a hint of concern in his voice.

Clark had been about to ask the same thing and was relieved when she gave a simple nod.

"Do you have any idea what that was?" asked Clark.

"No," Carrie answered shaking her head. "I couldn't find any records of anything exactly like it. The thing it most resembles is the EMP pulse released by a thermal nuclear device. But there has never been one as widespread as this. And if it had been a nuclear event it should have shown up on seismographs all over the world, but it didn't."

"What exactly do you mean by widespread? You mean it happened in more than just Metropolis?"

"Yes, Clark, it was very widespread. It covered most of the northern hemisphere. It propagated within the atmosphere at roughly 0.5 of the speed of light. From the time it took to reach various cities, I can calculate an origin location. Here, let me bring up an animation."

Suddenly beside her on the display was a high-resolution globe of the Earth. After a couple of seconds a brilliant white flash occurred somewhere near the top. Then as Clark and Jimmy watched, a smoky ring of white light spread from the flashpoint and rolled out to the south. Slowly as it progressed, the ring became broader and more diffuse. Finally, in the western hemisphere, it faded below the perceptual threshold at about the Mexican border.

"Carrie, can you highlight the point of origin again?" Clark asked with a sinking feeling in his gut. Then as he continued to watch, a stationary blinking white light appeared in the Artic Ocean far north of the Canadian mainland. "Can you also give me coordinates?"

Once the latitude and longitude was added to the global display, the sinking feeling turned into fist trying to twist apart his guts. Within an error tolerance of plus or minus ten miles, the origin point had been his Fortress. What had happened up there? Were Lyla, his Mom, and all the others in Kandor okay? He had to get up there now.

Clark was just about to open his mouth to come up with some excuse to get away when he was stopped by Carrie's voice.

"There is some problem with the shuttle launch."

Quickly the globe faded from the display to be replaced by two new display windows. One showed a view of the mothership/shuttle pair from one of the chase aircraft and there wasn't anything obviously wrong from that view. The other window showed what had to be the mission control center on the ground. As Carrie brought up the sound level, a reporter visible in the foreground could be heard.

"To repeat. The mysterious energy pulse, which briefly knocked this control center off-line, appears to have damaged some of the electrical and computer systems onboard the Constitution and its mothership. The word we are unofficially receiving is that the countdown can not be aborted and the latches which hold the shuttle to the mothership have failed in the closed and locked position. In . . ." and the reporter paused to glance back over his shoulder at the large countdown display on the back wall of the control room. "In five seconds the first set of scram-jet rockets on the shuttle are scheduled to fire."

The reporter stopped speaking and his eyes turned to some unseen monitor. Clark, Jimmy, and Carrie's eyes all turned to the other display window and almost instantly a plume of white smoke was visible from the smaller outboard pair of exhaust nozzles on the shuttle. Less than two seconds later the smoke plume was replaced by twin brilliant yellow-white cones of fire which seemed to extend aft almost to the mighty vertical tail fin of the 777 mothership.

Over the next couple of seconds, the still mated pair seemed to recede rapidly away from the camera as the shuttle's powerful engines threw them forward. Then the view from the camera started to vibrate violently as the military chase craft kicked in its afterburner. Slowly, over an excruciatingly long five seconds, the shuttle-mothership combination started to grow in the camera view as the chase plane gained ground.

As the image once again started to fill the display, large white condensation donuts were forming about the nose of the jet and the shuttle as the shuttle pushed the pair through the sound barrier and into an aerodynamic regime where the passenger jet had never been designed to perform. However even as the supersonic airflow made the giant airplane's control surfaces increasing ineffective, it was rapidly becoming a race between that and the raging fire in the tail as to what would be the ultimate cause for the unstoppable loss of the mothership and its still attached passenger.

For one incredibly long second Clark was frozen in place. As a result of the energy pulse, which had somehow originated at the Fortress, his Mom, Lyla, and all of his friends in Kandor might be dead or dying. However, for certain, if he didn't act in the next couple of seconds, Lois and everyone on the mothership and the shuttle would definitely be dead.

End of Chapter 3

Duane


	4. Chapter 4

12/2/06

Kandor - Chapter 4

Lois Lane stepped down from the white shuttle bus which had been used to transport the selected reporters from the main Metropolis Airport terminal to this remote, heavily guarded runway being used as the launch point for the new prototype shuttle. The stifling August heat, which was so typical in Kansas, struck her full in the face as soon as she exited the air-conditioned bus for the two hundred foot hike to the portable boarding ramp lined up with the forwardmost hatch on the blue and white NASA Boeing 777. Immediately she felt a trickle of perspiration begin to run down the center of her back and start to dampen the silk of her blouse.

Why do they always do this? she wondered. They could have pulled up right next to the boarding ramp, but no, they have to make us get all sweaty and then the airplane will have its air-conditioning set to 'supercold' just to make it as uncomfortable as possible.

Knowing bitching about it would do no good and would doubtlessly only get her on everyone's bad side, Lois tried to hold in her famous temper and focus on the job at hand. Knowing Jimmy or one of the other photo editors back at The Planet would be monitoring the output from her contact lenses for shots they could use to highlight her story, she gave the paired mothership and shuttle a slow, steady pan from nose to up-stretched tail.

She had flown on the commercial version of the 777 more times than she cared to remember. And growing up a military brat meant she had flown on more types of planes than most of the public, but staring up at this conjoined pair today somehow seemed special. As her gaze swept out along the expansive wing to the small vertical fin at its tip, for some reason her thoughts suddenly flashed to the first time Clark had made an appearance in the red and blue-clad 'Superman' persona. Perhaps it was the blue and white governmental paint scheme which reminded her of that stormy night encounter between Air Force One and Superman. For a moment the famous image shot from a camera in the plane showing Superman supporting the empty engine-pylon with one hand and throwing a jaunty salute with the other blazed forth in her mind.

Why had that image of Clark saving Air Force One come to mind right now? And why did it bring forth such a strong feeling of déjà vu? Clark had been gone for five years now, so why did it have to happen now? For she knew once she allowed thoughts of Clark, the 'real' Clark, back into her head, it would be hours until she would be clear of them again.

Trying to get herself focused back on the assignment at hand, she turned her eyes up to the shuttle attached to the upper surface of the 777. It looked vaguely reminiscent of the old shuttle with its dark gray lower heat-resistant surface and white upper body. But the resemblance pretty much ended there. From the background material she had read, she knew the old fragile individual tile system had been replaced with a one piece design which had been 'grown' using a variation of the stereo lithography process which was revolutionizing the manufacturing processes in so many industries in the same way the assembly line had revolutionized production a century earlier or the personal computer had done twenty years earlier. But the technology used to develop the new shuttle wasn't an interesting story angle since most people had already had home assemblers for several years and once you were used to 'growing' clothes in the latest style atom-by-atom in less than ten minutes, 'growing' a spaceship's hull didn't really impress.

She moved her gaze on to the more radical scram-jet engines which could accelerate the ship up to Mach 9 within the atmosphere - greatly reducing fuel consumption and permitting the revolutionary single-stage to orbit capability, but her thoughts kept drifting back to Clark Kent. And once she let herself admit it, she knew the real reason had nothing to do with how this aircraft reminded her of the old Air Force One. No, the reason Clark was on her mind was because of her son, Jason.

Jason had given her an incredible fright this morning as she had been caught up in the usual rush to get herself ready for work and Jason ready for his second day of Kindergarten. Lunches were packed, Richard had left fifteen minutes earlier for a meeting, and she was cleaning the breakfast dishes when she had glanced through the open doorway into the den and discovered Jason holding Richard's old upright piano up with one hand while reaching with the other for a marble which had rolled underneath it. She had seen small glimpses of her son's true heritage before, but never anything approaching the ability to lift a five hundred pound piano with one hand.

Once the momentary shock of fear that the piano would fall and crush her son had passed, her next thought was how to break the news to Richard when he inevitably witnessed something similar. He knew Clark was Jason's father, but like most of the world, he had no idea Clark was actually Superman.

She hated to chastise Jason for doing something that was only natural to him, but she spent the next ten minutes explaining the importance of never using his abilities in front of others. As she talked, she hoped he had inherited from his father the ability to conceal his true nature, too. She had known Clark for almost five years before she discovered his secret. Knowing Martha Kent must have gone through many of the same situations when Clark was young, Lois had tried calling her for advice after she had reached the office. Strangely, she had gotten an 'out of service range' message for Martha. She couldn't remember the last time she had gotten that message when trying to reach anyone within the United States except for a brief period after the loss of Seattle and San Francisco. Where was Martha Kent, she had wondered at the time. She had left a message and still hadn't heard back, which was unusual as Martha was always prompt to return any call regarding her grandson, even though most of the previous calls had been of a far more mundane child-rearing nature. But today, when she needed to talk to the one person who shared Clark's and Jason's secret, Martha was nowhere to be found.

Well, Lois corrected herself, Martha was the only one besides Chloe who knew the complete story. But one way or another, Chloe was at this moment beyond her reach as someone to lean upon. For, despite her best effort, she hadn't been able to find a trace of Chloe since the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. However today, even thoughts of Chloe brought her mind circling back to Clark, as her first visit to Smallville and her first meeting with Clark had been a result of a much earlier occasion when she had thought her cousin was dead. That time things had even gone so far, a gravestone had been erected in the local cemetery in memory of Chloe. This time it had already been a year, but Lois hadn't yet brought herself to setting up another memorial marker in her honor. Until she did, she still had a little hope in the back of her mind that Chloe was still alive out there somewhere.

The long hike across the scorching tarmac had almost reached its end and Lois knew she needed to concentrate on the task at hand, but the ache in her heart, which flared whenever she thought of Clark, was nowhere near ready to abate. After five long years, she would have thought by now she could think dispassionately about him, but not so. Although at least the white hot fury she had felt in the beginning had cooled from volcano hot to more like the bubbling mud-pots in Yellowstone she had seen during a visit with Richard and Jason early the previous summer, shortly before the war had flared into existence. How could Clark have simply walked away, or flown away, or whatever without a single word of farewell? And her heart began to pound again as she thought of that long ago day when she had sat at home in the apartment they had shared waiting to share the exciting news of her pregnancy only to receive word of Clark's departure via a phone call from Martha. For the millionth time she tried to comprehend what could have led to Clark's action. And for the millionth time, she couldn't come up with a convincing answer.

Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, Lois let the other reporters precede her into the aircraft while she worked to get her personal ghosts locked back up in the corner of her mind where they belonged. Clark was gone. Chloe was gone. And nothing she was thinking about was going to bring them back. No, she would muddle through the current situation without them. And when the time was right or the situation warranted it, she would allow Richard the rest of the way into the still secret areas of her life.

Squaring her shoulders and pasting her trademark smile onto her face, Lois strode purposefully up the stairway. Knowing work was the best way to get her emotions back under control, she once more ran her prepared questions about today's flight through her head. Foremost of the questions not answered by the background package she had been provided, was 'Where had this shuttle come from?'. Six months earlier there hadn't been even a whiff of information about this craft. And now it wasn't just a design concept on some engineer's desk, but rather it was a fully flight-worthy craft. There hadn't been any discussion of the craft's development at any of the NASA forums she had visited and all of her contacts, both at NASA and in Washington, had been unusually reticent. Every ounce of reporter's instinct she had developed in the past ten years screamed 'black projects' and 'military cover-up'.

Lois stepped into the relative darkness of the jet's small forward cabin and paused to let her eyes adjust. As she had expected, even before her vision had adjusted to the relative gloom, her body was already reacting to the cold interior air streaming passed her on its way out through the open door. At this moment it felt deliciously wonderful after the heat of the tarmac, but she knew it would only be minutes before shivering would set in.

Glancing about the cabin, the only open seat amongst the other reporters was in the second row near the center. For press conferences she generally preferred to sit in the center, but on airplanes she usually tried for an aisle seat. Trying to convince herself the center seat was a good omen, Lois squeezed passed two men, who she knew vaguely and who represented a couple of business magazines. As she wedged her oversized purse/attaché case under the seat in front of her, the man sitting in the next seat over addressed her with a churlish: "Well, well, well, if it isn't the Planet's star reporter, Lois Lana. What are you doing here? Isn't this event a little too close to 'heroic' for your tastes?"

Lois immediately recognized the voice, but still couldn't help but glance in his direction.

Brad Johnson, the science reporter for the Inquistor, was a heavy set man in his mid-to-late fifties. He seemed to have a personal grudge against her which extended back to at least the start of the war. She had never found out exactly why he felt the need to attack her at every opportunity, but assumed it was one more case of hating her for her 'Why we don't need Superman' story.

"Hello, to you too, Bradley," she began with her sweetest, most charming tone of voice. She didn't want to make a scene before today's show even got started. No, if she was going to make a scene it wouldn't happen until they were safely off the ground so they couldn't simply eject her. And if it did happen, it was certainly going to be for something more germane than a comment she had heard at least a thousand times before over the past twelve months. But that didn't mean she couldn't at least let a little air out of her seatmate's balloon. "Isn't this event a little too close to 'real' science for you? Or did I miss where they announced that this new shuttle is powered by a LuthorCorp perpetual motion engine?"

She watched as Johnson's face darkened, hopefully in embarrassment rather than true anger. Johnson had been suckered, along with several even more prominent science writers, by a prankster who had perpetrated an elaborate hoax claiming LuthorCorp was secretly developing a new power-source for the Defense Department. With a host of hints and stories planted at a variety of science and business sites, the story had quickly taken off. And with just the right wording in a few of the articles about secrecy clauses and non-disclosure pacts, LuthorCorp's official denials had only added fuel to the spreading fire. Before the end of the day, Johnson and several other reporters had publicly speculated that the final step needed for energy self-sufficiency was about to arrive and with it the end, after nearly fifty years, of the Middle Eastern leverage over the American economy. Then when the prankster had stepped forward the next day, Johnson had been forced to publicly retract his comments.

For a moment it looked like Johnson was going to return a biting remark, but then he slowly gave a small shrug. "Touché, Ms. Lane. I guess with hindsight we both have had days where our timing and judgment could have been better."

Lois almost blurted out a harsh response that their two situations were not at all similar, but she bit her tongue. This was probably as close to an apology she was ever going to get from Johnson about all the grief he had been giving her about her Superman article. She still believed his situation was due to poor judgment and lack of due diligence in the fact-finding department while her own article was still perfectly true. Her point had been about not needing superheroes; it had never been about not needing home-grown heroes. But that distinction was subtle and something many people didn't care to make with the current world political situation.

She was trying to come up with an appropriate response to the man's tendered olive branch when the NASA spokeswoman at the front of the cabin began to speak. In the end Lois settled on just giving Johnson a small nod before turning her attention to the front.

"Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am Roberta Faye, but you are welcome to call me Bobbie. I am here to answer your questions and relay information to you from the shuttle's crew, the mothership's crew, as well as from Ground Control. I would like to start with a brief discussion of security requirements and then I'll give a rundown of this afternoon's sequence of events."

As the woman turned towards the large display screen mounted on the forward bulkhead and the words 'Security Briefing' flashed up in giant letters, Lois subvocalized. "Smallville, get me some background info on Ms. Faye."

"Okay, Lois," came the cheery reply through the earplugs/transceivers she habitually wore like most everyone else at the dawning of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Almost immediately, the voice continued. "Here is a brief summary. . ." Smallville's voice seemed to be coming from the seat on the opposite side of her from where Brad Johnson was seating. When she glanced that way she wasn't surprised to find his image mapped over the top of the 'real' occupant of the seat. Her synth's ability to appear to actually exist in the real world had grown by leaps and bounds over the past six months. She knew he was really only an image projected by her contacts, but he could so smoothly blend in with the real surroundings it was sometimes difficult to remember he only existed in a computer somewhere. She knew the manufacturer was continuously upgrading the product, but sometimes her avatar seemed like more than simple computer code. Rumors synths had 'gotten smart' seemed to be more and more frequent on the 'net these days and not for the first time Lois wondered if they were true. For a moment her mind shift into full-on investigative reporter mode and she began to make a mental list of who to contact for useful sound bites and story-worthy quotes.

But then she forced herself to postpone thoughts on that topic for later. She needed to listen to what the NASA rep was saying as well as what Smallville was saying and there were definite limits on her multi-tasking abilities.

Deciding the NASA rep was still focused on security details that had about as much actual utility as the seat-belt demo at the start of every commercial flight, Lois turned her attention to Smallville. He looked a lot like the seventeen-year-old Clark Kent she had first found lying in a cornfield after she had veered her car off the small farm road as a result of an extremely near miss by a major bolt of lightening. Well, a lot like those first memories of Clark except for the whole nudity thing. She had tried a nude Smallville as her avatar back in the early days, but it had been way too distracting, so nowadays Smallville generally wore clothes.

She had originally given her avatar the 'young Clark Kent' look shortly after she had found out about Clark's big secret and for a while Smallville had even worn the Superman costume and everything. But then Clark had pulled his whole disappearing act and her world had come tumbling down around her. She had stripped Smallville of his costume and even deleted the personality modules which let him mimic some of the verbal duels she had so enjoyed during the early years of her acquaintance with Clark. She had even come close several times of stripping away all vestiges of Clark, but in the end she never did. No, the much restricted Smallville was the one small link to the real Clark she had allowed herself to retain. Although she was forced to admit Smallville seemed a lot less restricted than he did even six months ago. Oh, his personality wasn't quite the same as the real Clark or even particularly close to the much earlier Smallville, but he most definitely had a unique personality of his own. Just one more clue the rumors on the 'net might be true.

At the moment Smallville was leaning close and whispering the data he had acquired into her ear. And she knew if she closed her eyes it would seem almost like she could smell his cologne and feel his shaggy, near shoulder length hair lightly graze her cheek.

"Ms. Faye is originally from Australia. She got her start working P.R. for Lockheed on the Australian version of the F-35. Then five years ago, she accepted a transfer to the Skunk Works out in Palmdale. That was the last work-related reference to her I could find on the public 'net until she suddenly surfaced on six months ago along with the Constitution. On a non-work related front, she has participated in a number of 5k, 10k, and half-marathons over the past five years with most of them being in the Palmdale, Lancaster, Antelope Valley area, so there is a high probability she was at the Skunk Works the whole time. Would you like me to see if I can penetrate Lockheed's security and look for more data about her?"

She read the eagerness in Smallville's face, but wasn't certain if it was an eagerness to please her or an eagerness to test himself against the security barriers at Lockheed. Quickly, she shook her head 'no'. "No, Ms. Faye is not important enough to risk getting caught. The info you already provided is more than sufficient, as it gives one more clue where this 'shuttle replacement' came from.

Smallville's cheery expression faltered for a moment as though he was truly disappointed he couldn't take a crack at Lockheed's security. But it was no more than a moment and then the far more typical smile was once more back in place.

Turning slightly, Smallville used his head to nod towards the front with its on-going presentation. "Lois, something you might want to listen to."

Lois turned her attention back towards the NASA PR rep, but for a moment she was distracted by motion in her peripheral vision. A quick glance out one of the windows to her left showed the large gantry, located on the opposite side of the airplane from where the reporters had entered, was being backed away. The movement of the gantry, which had been used for crew access to the shuttle located far above, was the first true sign things were about to get under way. The second sign, the firing up of the 777's two big engines, came almost immediately afterward.

Lois' hands automatically checked that her seatbelt was fastened tightly, as she finally turned her full attention forward.

". . . of the scramjet engines. It was then that the program managers realized the potential for the Constitution class bomber to have space applications beyond its original scope and NASA was brought onboard the program," Ms. Faye was in the middle of saying as a photo-realistic animation of the Constitution achieving orbit was being displayed on the large screen.

Had she really just said 'bomber'? wondered Lois. Suddenly she wished she had been paying attention from the beginning of the woman's presentation.

"Smallville, give me the highlights, please, of what I missed," she whispered beneath her breathe.

Her vision seemed to blur for a second as her contacts shifted from passing a real-time image of what was in front of her to a recorded image of the video which had been displayed on the big screen at the front of the cabin a couple of minutes earlier. Then Smallville began a voice-over to summarize what the woman had been saying.

"Yes, she really did say 'bomber'," he began and once more Lois marveled at how it seemed he could almost read her mind. But then he had been her constant companion for almost six years and in many ways was closer to her than Richard or any other 'real' person could ever be.

"The Constitution program was originally started eight years ago as the next generation intercontinental bomber program to replace the old B-2s and the ancient B-52s. Its goal was to be able to reach any point on the globe within two hours to allow swift targeting when time critical intel became available. It was only during engine testing two years ago that it became apparent the engines were capable of speed and altitude performance significantly beyond spec and only modest rocket boosters would be required to lift the vehicle the rest of the way to orbit." As Smallville was speaking the big screen had gone to split-screen mode with the left panel showing the original bomber flight profile and the right panel showing the modified NASA flight profile culminating with the Constitution docking with the space station.

"Thanks, Smallville," whispered Lois as her contacts reverted to normal mode.

"With the Constitution-class shuttles providing a more cost-effective 'lift to orbit' capability," Ms. Faye was saying, as Lois shook her head slightly to clear the jarring transition of her abrupt shift in the field of view. "The Orion-class spaceships will be free to focus on the space station to Moonbase run and we project the moonbase staffing can be increased from the current six person permanent team to twenty-five permanent positions within the next eighteen months."

Lois almost felt like fuming as she sat there listening to the woman's presentation. She had thought an exposé on the secret military connection with the shuttle was going to be the perfect angle for her story, but they had just come clean on the whole situation. Now, every reporter would be addressing that issue. Still, there might be a political angle which could still work.

Never one to sit quietly in the audience, Lois raised her hand and then, without pausing, spoke up.

"Bobbie," she began informally, trying to stay on the PR rep's good side. "Aren't some other countries going to consider the use of the Constitution with its bomber-roots a militarization of space? And hasn't the United States signed treaties against just such activities?"

Lois was impressed how the other woman's smile never faltered, but then she had probably been selected for this job based on that very ability. And doubtlessly this was a question she fully expected and for which she had a rehearsed response. Lois was just glad she got the question out first, as this briefing was available live on the net, as most everything was these days, but more importantly, it would probably be the headline on the news summary services for the day. And it never hurt that her name and association with the Planet would be tagged to her question.

"Ms. Lane," the woman responded smoothly. Of course her contacts were doubtlessly displaying the appropriate name with every reporter in her field of view. "The militarization of space began a long time ago, most people either don't realize it, or prefer to give lip-service to the treaties. We and the Russians have been putting up military observation satellites for over 50 years. The Chinese have been using ground-based lasers to blind our satellites for over 15 years. Last year, at the beginning of their invasion of Taiwan, the Chinese set off several non-nuclear EMP bombs above the 100 kilometer altitude historically used as the demarcation line for outer space. I could go on, but the precedent has already been set.

"That being said," Ms. Faye continued, as she was forced to put a hand on the edge of the large display to stabilize her stance as the aircraft began to move. "All Constitution-class shuttles delivered to NASA will be used for strictly non-military applications. There will be no sudden military appearances on the space station, which our partners – including the Russians – will be able to confirm. So, yes, the Constitution can have military applications, but the NASA shuttles will not have any such role."

As a surprisingly standard 'fasten your seatbelts' chime sounded through the cabin, Ms. Faye concluded. "We will continue the briefing once we have finished take-off and the climb-out to altitude."

As the woman moved towards her seat, Lois raised her voice to be heard over the increasing whine of the engines. "Bobbie, why is this inaugural flight taking place in Metropolis rather than at Kennedy?"

The woman looked back at Lois with just a hint of relief in her eyes that the topic had moved on from the military connection. "It was desirable with the old liquid fueled rockets to take off over water, in case there was an accident. However with a high altitude air launch like this, the risk is minimal. I mean remember way back when the old Columbia tragically broke up on re-entry? Wreckage was strewn across three states, but no one on the ground was hurt. So, it was decided to move the launch inland as we still have many enemies, big and small, who could more easily target any launch from Kennedy while staying in international waters."

Suddenly an article Lois had written about four years earlier popped into her head. "The choice of Metropolis wouldn't have anything to do with its proximity with McConnell Air Force Base, would it?" McConnell, located in nearby Wichita, was the home to the largest Air Force Tanker fleet in the continental United States. Four years earlier she been out at the base for the ceremony when their first four 777 aerial refueling tankers had gone operational. If she remembered correctly, by now the base should be home to at least thirty. And it made sense that the Air Force would retrofit some of their tankers for mothership duty rather than build another whole dedicated fleet of 777s. Therefore what was a more logical place to set-up the operation of the Constitution bombers and shuttles than at the home base of the motherships?

Lois watched as the first frown she had seen crossed the other woman's face.

"Ah . . . McConnell will be the maintenance base for the Constitution shuttles."

"And will it also be the base for the Air Force bombers?" Lois pressed.

The woman appeared to hesitate for a moment, as though the conversation had drifted outside the proscribed boundaries. Then she tilted her head slightly like she was listening to someone only she could hear. But that was becoming common with everyone these days with the near universal acceptance of the latest generation contact lenses and ear pieces.

Finally, after nearly ten seconds of silence, she answered. "Yes, both variants of the Constitution will be based out of McConnell to maximize the economies of scale and therefore minimize NASA's costs."

Lois sat back and couldn't suppress a small smile. Once more she had gotten her story.

* * *

The rest of the climb to launch altitude seemed almost anti-climatic. Lois spent most of her time in conference with Smallville as they worked as a team to flesh out her 'Was the Constitution Program a militarization of space or not?" story angle.

As the chronometer in the corner of the large display counted down to the final couple of minutes before the launch, Smallville was off searching the net for more usable quotes to go with the story and at the moment there was nothing productive she could do on that front. Lois leaned back in her seat and tried to pay attention to what Ms. Faye was saying and what was being displayed on the big screen. But the presentation was starting to get repetitive and the other reporters seemed to be asking the same questions over and over.

So instead, Lois found herself thinking about the tentative plans she had been making with Richard for the three of them to go down to Disneyworld for the long Labor Day weekend. Before she knew it, she had brought up a screen filling a quarter of her field of view and was using it to surf travel sites looking for the best package. Jason had been talking about little else for weeks. She hoped it would be as much fun as her son imagined. And thinking about it from his perspective brought back memories of her own first visit to Disneyworld. She had been eight and Lucy had been five, almost exactly Jason's current age. It was one of the few fond memories from the years after her Mom had died. The trip had just been the three of them – her, Lucy, and The General, although he had only been a Lieutenant Colonel way back then.

And thinking about that trip once more reminded her of how long it had been since she had seen her sister, almost three years. Oh, since the introduction of the contacts they had chatted at least once a week. And by standing in front of mirrors and swapping the output from each other's lens, it was almost the same as being there. The keyword, being almost – oh, it was a definite step up from the old videophones, but it still didn't let you, as the old saying went, 'reach out and touch someone'. For it seemed no matter how perfect the visual image looked, it still took the more hindbrain senses of touch and smell to make a thing seem perfectly real.

Anyway Lucy's life and family were in Geneva these days. Richard, Jason, and she had planned to go over for a visit during the previous Christmas holidays, but then the war had come and air travel had become even more restrictive than during the heyday of terrorists' attempts at airliner bombings. So that trip had fallen through and now it was three years since she had seen her baby sister. And she had yet to see her newest niece, Jordyn, who was about to turn two.

Shaking her head at all of these distracting thoughts, she glanced up at the big countdown display – 40 seconds to launch. Hurriedly, she saved the travel reservations she had been working on and cleared that screen from her field of view so she would be forced to give the upcoming events her full attention. Of course, thoughts of Richard, Jason, and Lucy were not banished as quickly and easily as closing a browser window on display in her contacts.

The countdown had reached 34 seconds when Smallville suddenly appeared in her front of her. This time he didn't bother to try to overlay his image on one of the adjacent reporters, but stood directly in front of her, his body appearing to stand half way protruding from the seat as though he was a ghost from a particularly old, low budget monster movie.

And for a computer generated image, Smallville somehow had contrived to look like he had just run ten miles to reach this current location. "We found him," he exclaimed. "We found him."

Found who? Wondered Lois. There had been several men's names on the list he had been trying to track down for material to flesh out Lois' story. But none of these should have elicited this kind of excited response. And who, besides Smallville, could the 'we' in his comment have been referring to?

Lois was about to ask what he was talking about when Smallville let out a sharp 'shit' and was just starting to swing his head around to the north when suddenly and unexpectedly, Lois's vision went dark. And it wasn't some gradual transition like a pleasant beachfront sunset where twilight fell over a number of minutes. No, one second everything was fine and the next, everything had gone a true pitch black.

For a second Lois froze, uncertain what was the matter. Then just as the panic was starting to set in that something was wrong with her eyes, the jet started to buck like it was hitting severe turbulence and the passenger compartment began to fill with hysterical screams. The calm, unflappable reporter in her took over as she quickly rationalized that simple turbulence wouldn't be sufficient to cause the reaction among the others she was hearing. No, more than turbulence must be going on; she quickly surmised she wasn't the only one who had suddenly gone blind.

Gingerly she raised her hands to her face and slowly worked her right index finger up to her right eye, guessing her vision problem must be related to her contacts, although she didn't remember ever hearing of this failure mode before. As she worked, she heard other passengers being thrown about the cabin and was glad she had long ago learned to abide by the rule of keeping your seatbelt fastened when you were in your seat. Although when Brad Johnson's shoulder jostled her arm and almost made her stab her fingernail into her eye, she suddenly wished airplane seats also had shoulder restraints like cars.

Finally after what felt like ten attempts spanning five minutes, but which in reality was only a few seconds, Lois popped her right contact free. Blinking to adjust to the sudden light and the disconcerting blindness remaining in her left eye, she scanned the cabin. The lights were just flickering back on, as was the big forward display. Bobbie Faye was on the floor curled into a fetal ball, although whether in shock or merely to protect her head wasn't instantly clear. Three or four of the other passengers were down in the aisles and everyone else seemed to be clutching at their heads or eyes.

"Listen to me, everyone," shouted Lois over the roar of engines and screeching of fellow passengers. "The contact lenses have failed. If you remove them, you will be able to see."

As several of the nearby reporters, including Brad Johnson, heeded her words and started to work at their own lenses, Lois' good eye turned back to the giant display at the front of the cabin. As she watched, the display continued to count down from twelve towards zero. That couldn't be right, she thought. They couldn't be continuing the launch after whatever electrical event had failed all of the contacts and certainly not while they were experiencing this extreme turbulence. What if they caught a severe updraft immediately after separation and the two large craft were thrown together? Then, as the timer passed down through the five second mark, the screen began flashing in red with alternating black and white lettering which read – 'Danger! Servolock Mechanism Failure! Danger!'

Lois had no idea what the message meant, except given the circumstances, it couldn't possibly be good news.

Then as the timer reached zero, the cabin filled with the loudest roar Lois thought she had ever heard and the vibration level went up so far the earlier turbulence felt like a glass smooth ride in comparison. As she grabbed her armrests, just for a moment she almost wished she had left her contact in so she would be blissfully ignorant of the true situation. For now the warning message was perfectly clear, the shuttle's engines had just powered up and the two craft were still locked together.

* * *

Clark tore his eyes away from the giant monitor, which was in the process of showing Lois' final seconds of life, if he didn't act immediately.

Realizing his target was probably many miles from Metropolis at this moment and it would take even him a measurable number of seconds to reach it, Clark knew he didn't have time to make an excuse and then a subtle withdrawal. So he threw a quick hand signal in the direction of Carrie and hoped she understood and could come up with a distraction for Jimmy.

As he turned and leapt into flight towards the bank of windows on the far side of the room, Clark briefly wondered how Carrie was observing the room. Previously he assumed she was tapping into the camera function of any nearby contact lenses, but with all of them down, she must have another way. But then with the countless technological changes which had swept the world during his five year absence, there were probably more traditional electronic cameras, which would be less susceptible to an EMP pulse, scattered unnoticed around the newsroom.

Deciding to do his part in generating a distraction for the other occupants of the room, Clark proceeded to use his powerful breathe to blow out all of the windows rather than just the single one necessary for his departure, surely the high winds buffeting the seventy-third floor of the Planet building would occupy their attention. As he swept out of the building, the first thing he did was to sweep his gaze from left to right and use his powerful heat vision to vaporize all the shards of broken glass to protect the people on the street far below.

Then he arced into a vertical climb and began accelerating, knowing his destination would be up at the extreme altitude limit of the 777 to give the shuttle the maximum benefit of speed and altitude for a launch to orbit. He didn't know what direction from the Metropolis he would need to travel to reach the joined pair of vehicles, but he knew they should be easy to spot once he had gained a little altitude.

As he rose, he stripped off his business suit and let it fall away. He would doubtlessly be seen somewhere during the rescue and it would be better in his gray 'Superman' attire then in a business suit. Since everyone's contact lenses were down, Carrie and her associates wouldn't be able to use them to do their 'blur his face' magic as she had promised. So, it was definitely necessary to fall back to his old self-imposed rule of 'no normal attire while using superpowers'.

Under less rushed circumstances, he would have taken a moment to stash his clothes somewhere for use after the emergency, but this time he just left them to flutter down in his wake. Not only didn't he have time to stow his street clothes, but more specifically he had no intention to return to The Planet building immediately after rescuing Lois and the others. No, once she was safely back on the ground, he was heading straight to the Fortress to figure out what had caused the energy wave and, more importantly, if anything had happened to his Mom and Lyla. If they were okay, there would be plenty of time to pick up another change of clothes before returning to Metropolis. And even if they were okay, Metropolis was not on the top of his list, as his next destination was definitely going to be Taiwan or China so he could determine exactly what had happened to Chloe. Boy, back less than a day and he was already back into his old Superman rut of continuously racing from place to place. Already he was missing the quiet life he had lived in Kandor during the two year voyage back to Earth.

Forcing his attention away from the next couple of problems he faced and onto the one at hand, Clark caused his body to spin rapidly as he climbed to simplify scanning for his target. He was almost ten thousand feet off the ground when the burning jet finally cleared the distant horizon. Instantly, Clark stopped the spin and accelerated towards his destination.

Once he had the target located and a clear line of sight, Clark realized he didn't even need his 'super' vision to see the pair. No, at this distance and with flames now streaming back for nearly three hundred feet and a trail of heavy black smoke extending almost a mile, they looked more like a giant cosmic fireball descending from the heavens than a manmade aerodynamic assembly.

Of course, having the gift of telescopic vision, he couldn't help but use it. And with it, the simple fireball quickly resolved into two vehicles – the shuttle and the 777 – with the source of the plume of fire and smoke being the tail of the 777. Even as he watched, larger and larger chunks of the tail were falling away. It wouldn't be more than a few seconds before the whole tail was gone. Clark drove himself even harder to close the remaining forty mile gap.

As he approached, Clark studied the two ships. The shuttle still looked to be undamaged and if he could get it free and give it a boost to compensate for the wasted fuel which had gone into accelerating the 777, it might still be able to complete its mission. Or if not, at least it might be able to land on its own, as handling just the 777 alone looked like a sufficiently big challenge. It certainly looked like more of a challenge than rescuing Air Force One way back on that first day he had gone public. Then he had merely needed to act like a missing engine, but this time he was going to have to provide both lift and control for the whole aircraft. And for all their size, modern aircraft were in many ways just as fragile as the original Wright Brother's flier. Until mankind discovered anti-gravity or some equally powerful energy source, heavier-than-air vehicles would always be far more delicate than an earth-bound or water-bound counterpart.

Arriving at his goal, Clark considered giving the burning tail of the 777 a blast of his powerful freezing breath like he had used to keep the tanker truck from exploding during his battle against Zod, but quickly gave up on the thought for the moment. No, until he removed the fire's source, namely the shuttle's powerful engines, putting out and keeping out the fire in the giant jet's tail was hopeless. Therefore without pausing, he raced into the narrow gap between the top of the 777's fuselage and the lower surface of the shuttle. It was a tighter fit than he expected from the video footage he had see back at the Planet. Obviously, the light from the sky beyond the pair made the four foot gap seem wider than it actually was.

Forced into a crouch with his knees tight against the 777's fuselage and his shoulders against the shuttle, Clark took a fraction of a second to inspect with his x-ray vision the most forward of the three connections between the two ships. Quickly he spotted both the normal release mechanism and the explosive bolts included for emergency separations. Deciding this certainly qualified as an emergency, he burned through the two bolts with his heat vision. Then, knowing what to look for he quickly repeated the process on the two aft joints and immediately he could feel the two crafts starting to separate.

Concerned about damaging the shuttle's thermal protection system, Clark carefully stretched out his hands while maintaining contact with his shoulders. With this widest possible distribution of load, he started adding his own lift to the already potent output of the shuttle's engines. By the time he had a proper center of gravity worked out and had time to spare to look down at the 777, a gap of several hundred feet had already opened up. Hurriedly, he sent a blast of freezing breath towards the 777's burning tail. However it appeared to have minimal effect due to the widening gap and the limit of how hard he could blow without disrupting the task of helping the shuttle.

Wishing he could push the shuttle harder, but forced to keep the shuttle's accelerating down to six Gee's to not kill the shuttle's crew, he could only helplessly watch as the 777 began to waver from the straight path the powerful thrust-vectoring engines of the shuttle had helped maintain. Now, with that source of stability gone and its own stabilizing tail a burning wreck, it would only be seconds before the 777 would begin its death spiral dance.

* * *

Smoke was beginning to fill the cabin when Lois heard a series of popping sounds and then what sounded like tearing metal somewhere directly above. Almost immediately the horrendous vibration, induced by the firing shuttle engines, began to recede. Somehow the shuttle had finally separated, she realized. Unaware of the true fatal damage already inflicted on the 777's tail and believing the worst now to be over, Lois quickly released her seatbelt's buckle. Struggling past Johnson in the adjoining seat she moved to reach Ms. Faye and two reporters lying unconscious in the aisle.

Coughing hard from the acrid smoke, Lois knelt down beside the other woman and felt for a pulse. Reassured by the steady thump, thump, thump she felt with her forefinger, Lois quickly grabbed the woman and began dragging her towards a vacant seat at the front of the cabin. She knew proper procedure was not to move an unconscious person with possible neck or spinal injuries, but she could feel the vibrations in the plane starting to increase again. It definitely felt like a smaller risk to get the woman strapped down than to have her thrown around the cabin some more.

Lois had just managed to get the woman lifted halfway across her shoulder to heave her into the seat when the jet slew sideways and they both tumbled across the open space at the front of the cabin and crashed into the exit hatch. In the process the woman's knee slammed into Lois' gut and knocked the wind out of her. For a second she laid there with the suffocating feeling familiar from several other similar 'wind knocked out of her' events she had experienced in her surprisingly dangerous profession. Slowly her lungs started working again, however before she could do anything the jet pitched the other way and the two women went hurtling towards the opposite side of the cabin.

As they half slid, half rolled to the other side, Lois managed to snag the dangling seatbelt of the front seat she had been trying to get Ms. Faye into. With her other hand she kept a hold on the other woman's wrist and managed to keep them from hitting the far wall. Then in a momentary lull before the jet surge back in the opposite direction, Lois managed to pull herself to her feet and drag the other woman into the seat.

Just as she got the seatbelt engaged around the other woman's waist, the jet switched from its side-to-side oscillation to an abrupt nose up position. Immediately down went from under Lois' feet to somewhere on the back wall of the cabin and she was left dangling in mid-air by the one hand which was still grasping the seatbelt. For an instant her mind flashed back to the long ago day when she had been similarly dangling by a seat belt strap from the wrecked helicopter on the top of the Planet building. That time had been far scarier with an eight hundred foot drop to the pavement far below as opposed to the twenty-five foot drop to the back of the cabin. But on the other hand, this time was almost as bad as she now knew the jet was in its death-throes and even if she survived the drop to the back wall of the cabin, the result would be the same. During her previous experience dangling from a seatbelt her rescue by Clark had come as a complete shock. Unfortunately this time she was fully aware of his abilities, but it didn't help soothe her concerns at all since there wouldn't be any last minute rescue by the long departed Clark.

Lois hung there for several seconds before the wild vibrations of the plane shook her grip loose. Fortunately for her, in those few seconds the jet bled off a lot of the speed imparted to it by the shuttle and had started to stall. As she fell towards the back wall, the nose came back down and she crashed onto the tops of the high seatbacks after dropping only ten feet. She bounced back for several rows before half sliding down between two rows. Several hands grabbed at her to hold her in place as the stalled plane began to spin.

Grabbing onto the nearest body to help maintain her position, she realized it was Brad Johnson and that she had fallen almost back into her own seat. But the way the aircraft was spinning, she knew there was no way she would be able to get herself back into her seat and get the belt fastened.

Helplessly, she glanced with her one good, contact-less eye to the nearest window and watched as the horizon flashed by in a dizzying manner. This was it, she knew. After all the dangerous situations she had been through in her life, one of them had finally caught up with her. For a moment it almost seemed funny that a simple plane crash would get her rather than one of the numerous supervillains she had thwarted down through the years.

As the great jet plunged towards earth, her thoughts turned to Richard and Jason, the two most important men in her life. How would they get along without her? Why hadn't she prepared Richard by telling him about Jason's true nature? God, there were so many things she had left undone.

She had always prided herself on being strong and independent, but now she couldn't slow the tears filling her eyes. She didn't want to die and miss seeing her son grow up.

* * *

The sky around Clark had faded almost to black before he felt certain the shuttle had sufficient speed and altitude to reach orbit. He didn't know if it was still on the proper trajectory to reach the space station since the rendezvous point was almost three-quarters of the way around the planet and he couldn't take time to shepherd it the whole way. However, even if it wasn't on the right trajectory, certainly it now had enough momentum to make at least one orbit before having to decide on a landing destination.

Giving the shuttle one final shove, Clark hovered for a second as its lower surface swept passed. Soon the bright, hot engine exhaust momentarily engulfed him. For a split second his mind was pulled back to the first time he had been this high above the ground. On a day well before he had even mastered his ability to fly, he had been dragged aloft by an old nuclear missile he had needed to disarm to prevent it from detonating over Smallville and destroying the whole town. It had been one long, scary drop back to the ground even though he had by then sufficient experience with his other powers to know such a fall couldn't hurt him.

Of course, he could still remember how at the time he had wished the fall had been able to hurt him. Not that he had wanted to be hurt, but rather because it would have meant he was still human. For during the three weeks prior to that day he had been a perfectly normal human and everything in his life had finally seemed right. He had even been able to allow himself to make love to his first love, Lana Lang. But then he had been shot and killed and Jor-El had extracted his horrific price for restoring Clark's life and powers. Clark had gone on to save Smallville that day, but the day's events had ultimately cost him, in different ways, both his father and Lana.

Stop these maudlin thoughts, Clark chastised himself, as he turned back towards the burning jet barely visible far below him. Accelerating a thousand times harder than he had been able to do while boosting the shuttle, he began to race back down. Since his mind was running at almost superspeed, he therefore hadn't really wasted more than a tiny fraction of a second on his personal thoughts; still he felt guilty as every small bit of time might be crucial to saving the crippled jet.

However as he descended, his mind had plenty of time to wander. He tried not to let his thoughts linger on the loss of his father and Lana, but rather he tried to focus on more recent happier times with Lyla. With Lana and then later with Lois, he had only been able to truly be himself during those brief periods when he was fully human. But with Lyla he could always be himself. In Kandor they both had normal human abilities. And if she joined him here on Earth, she would share all of his gifts, again making it safe to be together.

For a moment he daydreamed of giving Lyla a flying tour of the world – Paris, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and all the rest. A tour which wouldn't require the limitations imposed during the similar earlier tour he had given Lois shortly after revealing his true nature. No, with Lyla there would be no need to carry her nor would she be overawed by his abilities since she would share them, too.

But even as the daydream ran its course, a small voice seemed to whisper in the back of his head that if he took Lois to Kandor, like he had taken his mother, then they could safely be together, too. Even as the distance to the burning aircraft closed and he needed to start focusing his attention on getting it under control, he wondered why that thought about taking Lois to Kandor had popped into his head. Was it just her sudden proximity after five years apart and the knowledge he would be seeing her face-to-face in a few minutes? Or were his feelings still that strong for her? In every conceivable way, Lyla was the better match, but the little voice still asked if Lois was his one true love.

Abruptly Clark was swept from his thoughts by the realization that if he didn't decelerate immediately, he was going to punch straight through jet and come out the other side. As he slowed he cranked up his x-ray vision and began scanning the structure of the spinning plane trying to decide the best location to grab hold. The nearest piece of structure was the wing, but it was long and flexible. If he exerted too much force to stop the spin, the whole wing was likely to come off in his hands. And even if he could stop the spin in that manner, it would leave him in an awkward position to try and manhandle the jet safely down to the ground. No, grabbing the wing didn't seem the best solution.

As the wing swept by, the plane's on-going flat spin next brought the still burning tail near his position. The tail also didn't seem to be a good location for controlling the descent of the aircraft, but before moving his attention on, he took a moment to use his super 'freeze breath' to extinguish all of its encompassing flames. It certainly would be stupid to leave the tail burning out of control while he was trapped supporting the jet from some other location.

Finally, he swept his x-ray vision forward from the tail along the jet's fuselage and saw what he was looking for. Very stout structure existed along the bottom of the aircraft where the wings passed through the fuselage. Also in the area were the massive bulkheads which supported the main landing gear. This location was the structural heart of the airplane and the one location designed to handle the introduction of very large loads.

Once he had spotted this critical location, his body seemed to jump into motion without conscious thought. One instant he was hovering over the stricken aircraft and the next he was already flashing around and under the large jet. Once under the jet, he quickly selected the largest piece of structure extending between the two main landing gear wheel wells and then slammed his hands through the thin aluminum skin to grasp the cross-brace.

Immediately he began applying a slow steady torque, gradually building the intensity to avoid throwing the jet's passengers and crew around anymore than necessary, as they had certainly already been through enough for one day.

Slowly, over almost four full rotations of the large jet, he brought the spin to a stop. In the process, what little forward momentum the aircraft still possessed was also eliminated. The giant plane was left hovering in the air as though it was equipped with an anti-gravity drive from some old sci-fi movie.

Along with his ability to fly had come an incredible spatial sense, but in this instance it seemed to have failed him. As he looked down to the ground, he had expected to find it still thousands of feet below him, but instead he discovered he and the ship were barely more than three hundred feet up. Certainly the ground looked a lot closer than the view from the seventy third floor windows of the newsroom in the Planet building.

And looking down, he was startled to realize he recognized the terrain and they were nowhere near Metropolis. No, if he let the ruined remains of the jet's tail sag only a little, it would brush the tallest chimney of the old Luthor Estate on the edge of Smallville.

When he had started on this rescue mission he had intended to carry the damaged aircraft back to its launch point at the Metropolis Airport to simplify NASA's job of salvaging what they could. But now he realized after the rough ride the jet had been through, there were probably injured people on board. Turning his sight upwards while continuing to hold the jet in a hover, his gaze quickly penetrated the intervening structure and spotted several people lying motionless on the floor of the cabin. That decided things for him – people were always more important than hardware. Smallville Medical Center was less than three miles away versus the nearly hundred fifty miles back to Metropolis. Since he wouldn't risk further damage to the aircraft, the flight back to Metropolis would take an hour or more. So with the possible need for medical attention by people on-board, NASA was just going to have to come to Smallville for any salvage operations.

Clark headed in the direction of the Medical Center effortlessly holding the four hundred thousand pound aircraft above his head while searching for a suitable place to set it down. As he neared his destination he spotted the logical place to use and immediately wondered why he hadn't thought of it immediately. Had he really been gone from Smallville that long? There, next to the Medical Center was the field used by the Meteors, Smallville's AA baseball team. Oh, the team was definitely minor league with a stadium to match, but with stands only around the infield and a wide open outfield, it perfectly fit his needs. And even better, the Meteors typically played at night on weekdays so the area was completely vacant and he wouldn't have to worry about clearing away anyone on the ground.

Slowly Clark swung the jet around until the nose was over second base and pointed towards home plate. Then once it was in position, he began a gradual descent. Just as he was wondering if there was anyway to easily get the gear down, their doors popped open and they began to descend, seemingly of their own accord. Then he noticed the engines were starting to spool down and realized someone in the cockpit was still on their toes and doing what they could to help him.

He paused just long enough to be sure the gear was fully down and lock, then he carefully finished lowering the plane the rest of the way to the ground. Once he was sure everything was stable and after a quick glance back to verify all of the fires in the tail were still out, Clark flew out from under the fuselage and swooped up to the main hatch just aft of the cockpit.

After a quick glance at the emergency egress instructions printed next to the door, he pulled the emergency lever which would open the door and deploy the inflatable slide. As air hissed to fill the slide, the hatch swung slowly open, releasing a steady trickle of bluish-white smoke. Standing just inside the darkened interior was the woman he had for five years put off seeing – Lois Lane. Now, for all his superhuman abilities, he still felt the all too human butterflies in his stomach. For in some ways he had been looking forward to this moment for all those years and in other ways he had been dreading it.

* * *

Slowly, as she stared helplessly at the window, Lois realized the horizon wasn't flashing by nearly as fast as it had been. And then she noticed the vibration levels were also steadily reducing. Just as the view of the horizon came to a full stop, no longer spinning or showing forward motion, she heard someone exclaim, 'I saw him. It was just a glimpse, but I am certain it was Superman.'

Superman, she repeated numbly in her head, as though she didn't at first even recognize the word. After hearing repeated excited whispers of his name – or was it a title? Or a job description? She finally understood; Clark was back. On the one hand she felt almost like laughing, Clark always managed to show up when she needed him the most. On the other hand she could feel her long simmering angry trying to rise to the surface; she still had no idea why he had simply walked away from her five years earlier.

Trying to set her emotions aside for the moment, Lois worked her way free from where she had ended up draped across three other reporters in her row and moved back into the aisle. Several others were still lying motionless on the floor and needed attention.

As Lois knelt by the first man, she found it impossible to give him her full attention. The moment was almost upon her she had wondered about for a long time. How would she tell Clark about Jason? How did you tell someone they had a son they had never seen? A five year old son who had never known his true father? A son who was starting to exhibit his father's remarkable abilities? She had fantasized countless times how this conversation would go, but more and more lately she had begun to doubt it would ever take place.

Quickly and efficiently, while her mind pondered her personal situation, she checked out the first man utilizing her extensive experience with traumatic injuries – both her own, Jimmy Olsen's, and those of countless bystanders and victims encountered during her many adventures. The man, the reporter from Aviation Week she remembered, was unconscious with at least a broken arm and possible internal injuries or spinal damage. Since the rough part of the ride seemed to be over, there was no need to risk moving him, like she had done with Ms. Faye, before trained medical personal with a backboard and neck brace where available.

After recruiting several nearby uninjured reporters to keep an eye on him, Lois moved onto the next downed reporter. Although helping the others was important, if she was honest, she was doing it as much to distract herself until they were on the ground as she was doing it for altruistic reasons. Before bending down to checkout the injured man, Lois paused for a moment to remove the dead contact lens from her left eye. She had expected her eyes to feel better after its removal, but it helped less than she expected. Then another hard cough wracked her body and brought additional tears to her eyes, driving home that a lot of the irritation she was feeling in her eyes was due to the smoke filling the cabin. Still, being able to see with both eyes was a definite improvement.

As she knelt down by the second man, the door in the forward wall of the cabin opened. Glancing up, she saw a man in the doorway with a white box in his hands bearing the familiar red cross. Looking passed him she could see another smaller cabin filled with numerous old-fashioned computer monitors, several of which were lying broken on the floor. Lois quickly surmised that area must be the airborne control center for the mission. The open door at the far end of that second cabin showed the cockpit of the 777.

"I'm a doctor," said the man with the medical kit as he hurried over to the stricken man lying at Lois' feet.

Lois stood and stepped past the man on the floor into the cleared area at the front of the cabin to give the doctor room in the narrow aisle to work. She was just looking over at Ms. Faye, who was beginning to stir in her seat, when she heard the landing gear cycle down. At almost the same time she also noticed the engines were spooling down. A quick glance out the nearest window showed trees and buildings clearly visible; they were about to reach the ground.

When a final look about the cabin didn't find anyone in immediate need of her help, Lois moved towards the door. If Clark had miraculously shown up to save this airplane, he doubtlessly knew she was on board. As soon as the plane was safely on the ground, he would most certainly show up at the door. Although he was generally extremely modest about his extraordinary gifts, Clark still wasn't above the occasional grand entrance. What other reason could there be for his gaudy blue and red costume?

As she reached the door, Lois felt a slight shudder run through the aircraft followed by a bit of rocking which indicated the gear had touched the ground. Taking a deep breath, which she immediately regretted as it filled her lungs with more smoke, Lois tried to prepare herself and decide what she wanted to say. And it wasn't easy as there were so many things she wanted to say, so many questions she wanted to ask. Her mind seemed to be a complete jumble. Finally, she decided it was best to not over think the situation; she had always been gifted with a quick tongue, too quick many would say, and a quick wit so perhaps it was best to just trust her instincts.

After an eternity that probably wasn't more than five seconds, she saw the handle on the inside of the door begin to turn. Then the door began to slowly move, which almost surprised her as she had seen Clark, on more than one occasion, rip doors off and throw them halfway across the state. But not this time, as the door slowly swung outward until it revealed a man's hovering silhouette, backlit by the bright outdoor scene as compared to the relatively dark interior of the cabin. Only one man could hover outside the entrance of a tall structure like the 777. It was definitely Superman.

But there was something subtly different about him that didn't become obvious until he dropped through the doorway and landed just inside of the cabin. As Lois' eyes adjusted to the brilliant light pouring in through the open doorway, she realized what it was. The blue and red suit she had just been thinking about was gone. In its place was a simple, more subdued gray outfit. Oh, it was still form-fitting in a way only a superhero with bulging muscles could properly wear. But the bright colors were gone and so was the big flowing cape. What was the significance of the change, she wondered.

They just stared at each other for a moment, as though each was waiting for the other to speak first. Finally, Clark began, "Lois, I'm sorry."

For a moment Lois wanted to pull him into a hug after finding him alive and well after so many years of uncertainty. But then she remembered how he had disappeared without a single word of explanation and how that fact had torn her apart throughout all the long months of her pregnancy. And how could she forget that Jason had been forced to grow up without ever knowing his father? The last time she had seen Clark her life had been so happy and seemed almost perfect, but then he had simply walked away.

If only Clark had given her an explanation why he had needed to leave, even a short note, everything would have been different. But he hadn't and the more she thought about, the more her anger grew until a simple 'I'm sorry' didn't seem like enough, not nearly enough.

She had just been priding herself on her quick wit and tongue, but at the moment they both seemed to fail her. No, as all the anger and bitterness stored up over the last five years came rushing to the surface, she could only resort to a physical response. With blazing eyes, she pulled back her right hand and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.

End of Chapter 4

Author's note:

The burning airplane was my favorite scene of the whole 'Superman Returns' movie. So I had to take a shot at writing my own variation of that sequence. But I think it is the last bit from the movie we will see in this story.

So what is ahead? Hmm, I think we will see rampaging Kryptonian warsuits, the return of Brainiac, a dark Lex Luthor based more on the Smallville character than the buffoonish version from the movies, a rescue mission in search of Chloe, and, of course, more development of the Clark - Lyla - Lois triangle.

Duane


	5. Chapter 5

2/18/07

Kandor – Chapter 5

"Fuck," swore Lois, as she shook her throbbing hand. What was the saying in the 'good old days' when you were about to spank a naughty child? 'This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.' It certainly was true when you slapped Superman. It felt just like slapping a piece of granite, thought Lois, as she continued to shake her stinging hand.

She looked at his face and his expression said he knew he had deserved the blow. And that expression seemed to reach her far better than his 'I'm sorry' words had and she felt some of her anger abate.

"Why did you leave?" she asked with some anger still in her tone and barely biting back the 'me' at the last second. Standing here, in front of a cabin full of reporters, wasn't the right time to reveal too many secrets – both Superman's and her own. Hopefully, at least some of them would think the question was related to that stupid Pulitzer Prize-winning article.

Clark looked back at her and understood her anger. But he also felt the urgent need to get back to the Fortress; Lyla and his Mom could be in just as much danger as Lois had been.

Slowly, Clark leaned forward and moved his head down beside Lois' on the side away from the cabin's other occupants. Then he spoke in a barely audible whisper.

"Lois, the energy pulse which almost caused the plane to crash also affected much of the Northern Hemisphere. It appears to have originated up at the Fortress and I don't know how or why. My Mom and some others are up there. I have to go see if they are in danger. Come with me and once I am certain everyone is out of danger, we can sit down and talk."

There had been a time when she would have dropped everything and gone with him. But her life wasn't that simple anymore.

"I . . . I can't," she whispered back. "I have to pick Jason up from school."

Clark leaned back and then quirked a questioning eyebrow at her.

"My son," she responded to the unasked question.

"You're married?" he asked; doubting he'd been able to prevent the shock from showing on his face. In the back of his mind he had somehow assumed Lois had been waiting for him the whole time. However five years was a long time. He knew this should make telling her about Lyla easier, yet still his first reaction was a sense of betrayal. Did that mean his feelings for her were that strong?

Lois shook her head. "No, but we have been living together for a long time."

Clark wondered for a moment who it was. The first names from her past that popped into his head were Oliver and Bruce. Lois always seemed drawn to men with wealth, power, and more than a hint of danger. Or was it the other way around and they were drawn to her; himself included?

He was tempted to ask, but decided she would tell him when she was ready, or he would find out some other way. So instead he continued, "Can I offer you a quick lift back to Metropolis before I head north? I don't want you to be late picking up your son."

"Ride back? Where are we?" Lois asked.

Clark shrugged and for a moment she saw the teenaged boy she had first met so many years before.

"Smallville, where else?"

Lois couldn't stop a small grin. "Just like old times."

Then she gave a small nod and continued. "Yeah, I could use a lift. My car is at Metropolis airport."

Clark quickly bent and lifted her into his arms. As he turned towards the door, the cabin filled with shouts of: 'Superman', 'Wait Superman', and 'Where have you been, Superman?'

Pausing briefly in the doorway, Clark turned and answered using his deep authoritative Superman voice. "The energy pulse was widespread and affected more than just this airplane. Many others need my help. There will be time for interviews later."

Then carefully twisting his body to pass through the door without banging Lois' head, he launched into the air, pushing hard and fast towards Metropolis.

As the landscape rushed passed below them, Lois tried to suppress the strong urge she felt to snuggle tighter into his arms. Flying was always such an exhilarating rush, she thought after five years she had gotten over it, but now once more aloft she knew she hadn't. And feeling his arms around her, she also knew she wasn't completely over Clark either.

It seemed like only a handful of seconds had passed before she could see the Metropolis skyline growing in the distance. So she only had a few more seconds to decide what to tell Clark about Jason. For obviously from his uncomprehending expression when she had mentioned their son's name, Clark had no idea about him. From his comment about Martha being at the Fortress, he had seen his Mother since his return, but apparently Martha had decided to leave the telling to her. Lois wanted, no needed to get things out in the open, yet it didn't seem fair to just blurt it out when Clark had to immediately leave for the Fortress. No, he had gone five years without knowing, a few more hours wouldn't make any difference.

The 'The blue Audi over there,' direction from Lois turned out to be the first thing either of them said after leaving the grounded airplane.

Quickly, Clark landed beside the car and lowered Lois to the ground. Then he simply stood there for a moment hesitating.

"Clark, we really need to talk. How about coming to my house for dinner tonight? You can meet Jason."

Clark looked briefly at the sky and realized there was plenty of time to resolve things at the Fortress. "Okay, what time?"

"Let's say arrive at seven-thirty and we'll eat at eight. Oh, and how about dressing casual," she concluded with a pointed glance down to his gray Superman suit.

"Yes, ma'am," Clark responded with a hint of a grin. "Would it be okay if I brought Mom? I haven't spent enough time with her either."

Lois nodded.

"And your address?"

"4320 Riverside Drive."

"Okay, I will see you at seven-thirty. If something comes up, I will try to give you a call." Clark turned to go, but just before launching himself into the air, he paused and turned back. "Oh, one of the things I meant to ask you. Do you have any word on Chloe? My mom told me she has been missing since the Taiwan invasion."

Lois shook her head. "I have been pinging all of my contacts every couple of months, but nothing. There have been rumors of slave labor camps, but I can't even verify those stories."

"Well, when things calm down, we will have to put our heads together and see what we can find out," answer Clark with a tone of voice that sounded more like Clark Kent, Ace Reporter than like Clark Kent, Superman.

Lois couldn't suppress a snort. "When things calm down? If she is alive, I'm afraid Chloe will be old and gray before that day arrives."

"Yeah, you're right," Clark answered with a sigh. "I have been back less than twelve hours and it is already just like old times."

Then Clark looked her in the eyes. "I have to go, Lois."

"I know. Go save the world and I'll see you tonight."

Clark nodded and then leapt into the sky. In less than two seconds he dwindled to a tiny dot and disappeared.

Lois watched until he was gone before finally lowering her eyes. Five years of waiting were almost over. In a few hours they would sit down thrash things out until everything was out in the open: why Clark had left without a word, telling him he had a son, and deciding how they were going to proceed from here.

Feeling a sudden lightening of her spirits in a way she hadn't felt in years, Lois reached down and pulled the car's door handle. Locked. Quickly she felt her outfit for pockets. None. Damn, her keys were still back in her brief case on the plane. In frustration she kicked the car door. Hard. Finally, certain she had broken at least one toe, she hobbled off towards the terminal in search of a phone. Where was Superman when you really needed him?

- + - + - + - + - + - + - +

In less than fifteen seconds, Clark was just over three thousand miles north of Metropolis. The Fortress came into view and as he decelerated he gave the structure a thorough once over in every portion of the visual spectrum he could access – infrared, visible, x-ray, and many wavelengths in-between. None of them showed anything out of the ordinary, not that even his powerful senses could penetrate very far into the dense crystalline structure.

Sweeping downward, he twisted through the long, winding, maze-like passage which these days gave entry to the interior. Before his sojourn among the stars, he had caused the crystal structure to reconfigure and block the original ground-level entrance to prevent casual entry by unsuspecting visitors. The Fortress harbored many secrets that could be lethal, or worse, for unwary humans.

Finally, the passage he had been following opened up onto the main central room of the structure. Here lay the ruins of the central podium and its crystal command system through which most of the great structure's memory and analytical matrices had once been accessed. As he landed he couldn't help but remember how after years of hearing his father's voice through the auspices of his original tiny ship and then the ancient installation buried deep in the old Indian cave system, it wasn't until he first stood at the Fortress' podium that he had received a visual representation of his biological father, Jor El. But ever since the encounter with Zod in this chamber, his father's image and voice had been silent. Had the damage caused by the removal and then restoration of Clark's powers permanently destroyed some portion of the Fortress' memory system beyond the simple destruction of the primary podium?

Clark knew the control crystals used a variation of holographic storage techniques. Since the whole Fortress was a giant crystal structure, it seemed logical that the Fortress itself would act as a redundant backup for the information contained in the control crystals. He hadn't yet figured out how to even assert this backup existed, yet alone access it, but now that Kandor and its Kryptonian technology were available things might be within his reach. He hoped so, because there were things he would really like to talk to Jor El about.

However almost as soon as Clark had stepped passed the ruins of the podium, he had regulated this research task to the long list of other things he wanted to pursue when he had some free time and turned his attention to the problem at hand.

Moving to the opposite side of the chamber from where he had entered, Clark stepped into another passageway leading to the auxiliary chamber where he kept the large bottle containing Kandor.

After barely pausing to scan the sensor panel which continuously monitored the environmental conditions inside the bottle and which showed everything to be normal, Clark moved directly to the Gerry-rigged comm-station which allowed him to connect into Kandor's communications network. Immediately he tried to reach Lyla.

"Thank Rao, you're okay, Kal. I have been so worried," were the first words out of Lyla's mouth as her image coalesced on the display.

Clark couldn't help but give a small sigh of relief seeing she was alright. And it didn't hurt that he could see his Mother standing in the background, an equally worried look visibly fading from her face.

"No, I am the one who has been worried. The energy pulse covered almost a quarter of the planet. And when I learned the epicenter was here, well, very scary thoughts have been running through my head about what I might find."

"We are all fine, Kal. Brainiac's bottle is apparently insulated against this type of energy. But the sensors which I have been using to monitor the miniaturization device went absolutely crazy at the peak. That's why I have been so worried about you."

"Do you have any idea what happened?" asked Clark now that his immediate fears for the safety of Lyla and his Mom were abating.

"I think so. Can you hear anything different about the Fortress?"

Hear anything different? Clark had inspected the structure using his vastly extended visual range, but hadn't thought about simply listening to it. But what was the acoustic spectrum except the extremely long wavelength end of the overall spectrum of all things which function under wave theory.

Closing his eyes, Clark focused on what he could hear. And now that he was trying, a faint sound could be heard. Well, not so much a steady sound, but more like the vibrations you heard from a bell a few seconds after it had been struck by the hammer. The tone was in an overall sense very slowly decaying away, but it also had a harmonic component which sometimes cancelled and sometimes amplified.

Clark tried to explain what he was hearing in words to the image of Lyla on the screen, but didn't feel he was doing a very good job. But apparently his response was more or less what she was expecting because she quickly started nodding her head and then cut in on his rambling description.

"Yes, that is close enough," she interrupted. "What my models are showing me is that the miniaturization prototype is not anywhere near one hundred percent efficient. It leaks a lot of power, but only in a couple of narrow frequency bands. Unfortunately, one of these bands falls right on the harmonic frequency the Fortress is most sensitive to. So when the miniaturization device is used, it starts the Fortress to resonating. Now if the Fortress was located on land this probably wouldn't be a problem. But anchored out here in the Artic Ocean, the Fortress starts absorbing power and energy from the movement of the ocean currents through the underwater portion of supporting structure. Over time this energy field continues to build until it reaches a level it can no longer sustain and then the whole structure 'pulses' to dump the energy."

Clark rolled Lyla's comments around in his head for a moment. "So, you're saying we risk another pulse whenever we use the miniaturization device to move people back and forth between here and Kandor?"

Lyla shook her head. "No, not every time, but close. It appears to take three activations of the device to exceed the threshold. And even then the onset is not immediate. In this case, the pulse occurred twenty-three minutes after the third time you used the device."

"But I used it a lot more than three times during the voyage back to Earth," said Clark looking for a loophole in her theory.

"Well, your spaceship has a significantly different shape and is also much smaller than the Fortress; both these factors will greatly affect the specific frequency to which its crystal structure would be most sensitive. Also don't forget we were cruising through a void during the trip to Earth, so there wasn't an ambient energy field available to amplify the effect like the ocean located below the Fortress."

Clark slowly nodded. He was going to have to take Lyla's word on the matter. Being stranded on Earth, he hadn't had access to tele-learning machines during his formative years like every youth growing up in Kandor did. The level of math he had seen Lyla do in her head without accessing any outside aids, not even pencil and paper, was down right intimidating.

"So, what do we do now?" he asked.

As he watched her image on the display, Lyla appeared to stare off into the distance lost in thought for almost a minute. Finally, she blinked and refocused her gaze back on Clark.

"Kal, I think I can construct a device that will block the leakage coming from the miniaturization device from reaching the Fortress' crystal structure or at least transform the energy to a frequency band which is less harmful. However to do that I am going to need to rig up some better sensory equipment than is currently in-place in addition to setting up the actual equipment which will create the counter-field. Since all of the required equipment is going to have to be brought from Kandor to the Fortress through the miniaturization device anyway, I might as well come along for it will be a lot easier than trying to talk you through it remotely."

"Is it safe to use the device again or should I just go ahead and relocate it somewhere else first?" asked Clark.

Lyla shrugged. "It's your call, but my calculations show a less than 0.4 chance of the next usage instigating another pulse."

A less than one percent risk seemed tolerable to Clark. "Okay, let's just go ahead and try your approach here. The Fortress is the most secure location I know and I would rather not relocate the miniaturization device if it can be avoided. How long will it be until you can be ready?"

"I should be able to gather all of the equipment I need in about two hours. Then I will need another two hours to ferry it up to the exit point above Kandor's artificial sun. Throw in a little cushion and let's call it five hours until I will be ready to exit Kandor."

When Lyla paused, Martha jumped into the conversation for the first time. "Ah, Clark. If both you and Lyla going to be out there, I would just as soon leave Kandor, too. I have things I should be attending to back in Smallville."

Clark nodded. "Sure, Mom. Unless Lyla needs an awful lot of equipment, Lyla, you and the equipment should all be able to use the miniaturization machine in one pass."

Lyla glanced back over her shoulder at Martha. "It should be fine. All of the equipment I need will fit in a couple of travel bags. Wow, did I just say travel bags? What an interesting term from someone who has been trapped in a large bottle her entire life and has never been more than sixty miles from her home."

"Well," began Martha, as she reached out and lightly touched the younger woman's shoulder. "As long as you're going to be up in the Fortress, you and Clark are going to have to make a little time to explore some of our world. It can be a pretty nice place most of the time."

Lyla nodded and when she turned back towards Clark, he could see, even through the display that her eyes were glistening with excitement.

Clark smiled and suddenly felt a small lump in his throat. "Perhaps this will soon be your world, too, Lyla."

For a moment it looked like Lyla wouldn't be able to speak, but finally with a single nod she said. "Kal, we will see you in five hours."

As the display went dark, Clark stared at it for a moment daydreaming about showing Lyla his adoptive world. He had thought of this day often during the final months of the journey back to Earth after he and Lyla had fallen in love and now it was almost here.

But after staring at the blank display for a few seconds, it sank in that he had five hours to kill and nothing pressing to do at the Fortress during that time. And there were certainly other people out there who had been affected by the pulse and who could benefit from his help. He hated to be out of contact with Lyla for that long again, but for the moment there was no helping it. The Fortress had originally never been equipped for communication with the outside world. After the events where Zod had taken control of the planet while he and Lois had been blissfully ignorant up here at the Fortress, he had at least made provisions to monitor the satellite news feeds by placing a small mirror in orbit near one of the primary satellites so a small beam would be diverted up to this remote artic region. But since he had been the Fortress' sole occupant, having two-way communication capability had never been an issue. Now with Lyla and all of the other Kandorians up here, he definitely could use a way of communicating without always having to resort to flying back up here.

As Clark leapt back into the air to head back south, he decided another conversation with Carrie, Jimmy Olsen's AI associate was in order. Perhaps by now she had uncovered some word about Chloe. And she might be able to help with setting up the whole communications thing, as well as help with several other things that came to mind.

- + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +

The young girl followed the burly orderly down the antiseptic gray corridor. At first glance few would guess she was only thirteen. No, as a result of an early growth spurt she must have inherited from her father's side of the family, she already stood five foot eight. And thankfully, that was the only thing in the 'looks' department she had received from her father. For one of his three most frequent topics during their bi-weekly discussions were his trials and tribulations as a teenager at Excelsior Prep. If it had been that hard for him as a boy, she wondered, what would it have been like for her if she had inherited his trademark baldness?

Fortunately her 'looks' had obviously come from her mother - from her thick black hair to the hint of an oriental cast around her dark green eyes. As they passed a tall mirror, her right hand reached up and swept her hair back away from her eyes in manner that anyone who knew her mother would have instantly recognized.

But it wasn't the near supermodel beauty or the poise only a privileged upbringing could bestow that made her seem years older than her true age. No, it was simply her eyes. On good days they always glowed with a brilliant intelligence far exceeding anyone twice her age. And on bad days they could darken until they looked like something almost alien to the human race.

Fortunately for everyone around her, today looked to be a good day as she was in an exceptionally fine mood. Several projects she had been orchestrating for many months were coming nicely to fruition. And more importantly, the dark one had finally returned.

She was almost humming to herself as the orderly stopped in front of the door to the visiting room she always used during her visits. She waited calmly, using the time to go over her mental list of things she needed to discuss, as the man pulled out a large ring of old-fashioned keys to unlock the door.

Pulling the door open, he courteously nodded for her to enter, carefully keeping his face neutral. He was new having only started a week earlier, but already he had heard the rumors about this girl - the stories of an orderly who had made inappropriate comments to the girl and who had simply vanished the following night. He had no idea if they were true, but one glance at her eyes had convinced him he didn't ever want her attention focused on him.

The girl swept into the nearly barren room. No windows or pictures adorned its walls to break the gray monotony. The room's sole furnishings were a heavy wooden table and two straight back chairs on opposing sides. Her father was already slouched in the chair on the far side of the table having been led in from the depths of the prison's psych ward through a door in the opposite wall.

He was staring listlessly down at his gloved hands when she entered and didn't even acknowledge her presence until she reached the table and pulled the chair out with a squeal of wood on linoleum. For a moment she felt her temper begin to flare, the Doctors were supposed to reduce his level of meds before her visits.

When his eyes looked up and he recognized her, his face quickly became more animated.

"Hello, Lena," he began with a hint of a whine to his voice. "You were supposed to visit yesterday. You know how your visits are the only thing I have to look forward to in this place."

"I am sorry, father," she began politely. "You remember me telling you about Miss Cavendish, my science teacher at Midvale? Well, she hit us with a pop assignment in class yesterday morning that had to be done by today and I simply couldn't get away. Please remember how you always say getting a good education comes first."

As her father nodded sullenly, she couldn't help but think about the real reason she had been delayed; the contents of the slim wooden box she had laid on the edge of the table had not been ready in time. She hated to use her father as a guinea pig for the second stage of her AI experiments, but if they were successful, she might be able to use them to allow him to someday leave this facility.

And for once the delay had turned out to be fortuitous, after the events of the morning there were questions she needed to ask him about his previous encounters with Superman. The real challenge was going to be to get her father to talk without his dropping into a blind rage, as usually happened at the mere mention of the dark one's name.

Well, no point in beating around the bush, she decided. "Did the power outage hit here this morning, Father?"

"Yeah, but the emergency generators kicked in only a few seconds later. It was not enough time to do anything useful, if only there had been a little forewarning."

Even with all the meds they fed him, he still seemed to be in a perpetual 'escape mode' mentality, Lena thought, once again amazed at his will power.

"Did you hear the other news? NASA almost lost the shuttle and its mothership. And they would have, if 'HE' hadn't shown up."

Her father's eyes looked sharply towards hers and for a moment it felt almost like her old Dad was back – the man from the good old days of her childhood before the dark one had caused the death of her mother. Oh how she wanted to see Superman in Hell, perhaps even more than her father did.

"He's back? How long?"

Lena shook her head. "I have no idea. This is the first public report of him in five years. However with his need for the limelight, I would guess he hasn't been back long, perhaps a few days while he waited for the right opportunity to make a grand entrance."

She paused a moment for dramatic effect before continuing. "Actually, I did a little research into the rolling black-out that hit this morning and which affected much of the northern hemisphere. It apparently started at one central location and then propagated outwards. The origin point was way up north on the ice pack over the Arctic Ocean. I remember your stories of his Fortress of Solitude being located in that general area. Do you think he caused the blackout and the danger to the shuttle just so he could save it?"

Lena watched her father's face and saw that she had used the right hook to feed on her father's obsession that Superman was here to conquer the human race. She wasn't sure she shared that believe, not that it mattered. All she cared was that he had caused the death of her mother and therefore he had to be made to pay for his actions, whether they were intentional or not.

"Yes, it would be just like him to pull a stunt like that to convince the ignorant masses he is here merely to help. It makes you wonder how many of the other big things he did were also staged. I mean look at General Zod. The recording I saw about him up at the Fortress made him out to be the terror of the Universe, but a simple trick defeated him. Was that all part of some on-going Kryptonian plan to build up Superman's image as a savior and lull the planet into a false sense of security?"

As always, Lena felt this strange twinge in her heart at the mention of Zod's name, as though she had some unexplained connection to him. She even had a photo of him hidden in her jewelry box back at school. Once in awhile she would take it out and stare at it. She had first discovered the photo at an online website dedicated to the battle in Metropolis between Zod and Superman. At first she thought she had been drawn to it because Zod and Superman were locked in combat and Superman's face had just a hint of fear about the eyes; an expression she wanted to see again just before she destroyed him. However the longer she had the photo, the more she felt drawn to the image of Zod, as though he had played or would play an important part in her life. But how could that be possible? When he had arrived on earth, she was eight and had already been living in Midvale attending the private girls' school for almost two years. She knew she hadn't met him then. Had he been to Earth on an earlier occasion? Before she was old enough to truly remember?

Deviating from her plan for this conversation, Lena asked. "Father, was Zod here another time, before the battle with Superman?"

Lex Luthor looked at his daughter and his mind felt clearer and sharper than it had in years. He had long wondered if this moment would come, but now that she was older and had directly asked, perhaps it was time.

"Yes, no, well sort of. I have only the vaguest recollection of the events and most of what I know came from conversations with your mother. There was this professor, a Milton Fine, who secretly had some connection to Zod and his Kryptonian technology. He did something to me, injected me with chemicals or exposed me to radiation or whatever. Anyway for a brief time it gave me abilities similar to Superman: speed, strength, healing, flight and all the rest. The feeling was unbelievably exhilarating and intoxicating. However it wasn't done for my benefit, but only to prepare my body to become the permanent host for Zod. And Zod's spirit did take possession of my body and during that time my memories are a complete blank. It only lasted a couple of days and I am not certain how he was forced out of my body. Anyway that is why the answer to your question is sort of yes and no; he wasn't physically here, but sort of in spirit he was."

Lena stared at her father. This story was something he had never mentioned before. "When was this?"

Her father stared back at her. "The infamous Black Thursday when power outages and rioting broke out all over the world."

Lena had thought she had known the significance of that day, but this turned everything upside down. Way back in the 1960's there had been a famous blackout in New York. Nine months later an explosion of new births had occurred which was attributed to the event; Hollywood had even made a movie about it starring Doris Day. After she had learned at the age of ten about sex, conception, and how babies were truly made, she had done the math and knew she had been born nine months to the day after Black Thursday. She had thought at the time it was cool to know that an earth-shatter event had been involved in her conception and had imagined her parents in some glamorous Hollywood-style hideaway while the world appeared to be crumbling around them. But now suddenly she had learned her father had been possessed by the spirit of Zod on Black Thursday and had been given all the powers of Superman. Did that explain some of the strange things she had experienced since reaching puberty, things she had been keeping secret from everyone?

Even her dearest friend and confidant, her longtime roommate Linda Lee, only knew about a few of her newly acquired abilities and even she didn't know her true name was Lena Luthor. No, like everyone else at Midvale she only knew her as Lena Thorul, the name her great aunt Nell had used to enroll her six months after her mother's death and her father's imprisonment in an attempt to protect her from the stigma now associated with the name Luthor.

"The Black Thursday which occurred exactly nine months before I was born? How could you not tell me about this?" Lena responded with a little of the Luthor temper showing through.

Her father gave a small shrug. "For a long time you were too young to understand. And then after all of the years, well it seemed best to leave it buried in the past."

Lena almost wanted to cry out in frustration. If she had know, it would have made the past couple of years at least understandable if not any easier to bear. For a moment she wanted to confess everything she had been experiencing, the powers she had acquired. But then she remembered as long as her father was in here, there would always be the risk that some medication they gave him would make him say something he shouldn't. This was simply one more reason why she needed to proceed forward with her plans in the hopes of one day being able to safely remove him and have some long overdue father-daughter conversations.

"Perhaps you are right and it should be left in the past, Father. Now, since HE is back and since this morning's events seem to be tied to his Fortress up in the Arctic, please refresh my memory about what you know of the Fortress. I think a return expedition up there might be warranted."

Her father nodded and spent the next ten minutes describing what he knew about the Fortress from his two visits up there, the first time when he had discovered and explored an unoccupied Fortress and the second time when he had been flown up there as a guest/prisoner of Zod.

When he finished speaking Lena slowly nodded, it gave her plenty of food for thought. She might just have to make a little trip up there herself and sooner rather than later.

Slowly sliding the slim wooden box across the table, she finally got to the true reason for this particular visit. "Father, I have a small gift for you. It took a lot of time and effort to convince the Doctors to agree, but I think it was worth the effort and I hope you will come to appreciate it."

Lex stared at the case for a moment before reaching out and pulling it the rest of the way. It was a simple box made from unadorned cherry wood. And it was small, only eight inches wide by four inches deep and less than three-quarters of an inch thick. A small gold clasp held the two halves together. Slowly the thumb of his gloved left hand pressed the detent and the clasp sprang open. Rotating the cover up about the rear-mounted hinges revealed an interior compartment fitted with the standard components of the audio and visual gear almost everyone in the world had adopted. In one compartment was a month's supply of the contact lens everyone wore that didn't on the surface look any different than the daily-wear contacts people had been using for over twenty-five years. In the other compartment was a pair of tiny earbuds which fit discretely into the ear canals.

After inspecting the contents of the box, Lex looked across at his daughter. "So you thought it was time I joined everyone in the second decade of the twenty-first century?"

Lena briefly shook her head before flashing a small grin. "Come on, Father. It is the third decade of the twenty-first century and has been for months." Then putting a more serious expression on her face she continued. "I thought giving you selected access to the outside world would make you happy. Oh, the Doctors insisted on some restrictions, but it is a lot better than nothing. Why don't you go ahead and give them a try, while I am here to help with any questions."

Lex looked thoughtfully at his daughter for a moment. He had long claimed to be 'The World's Greatest Criminal Mind', but from what he had seen over the past few years, Lena might simply be the World's greatest mind – criminal or otherwise. However he could still read her well enough to know this was all part of one of her schemes, yet he had faith she would never to anything which would directly harm him. So with hardly any hesitation he removed the topmost pair of contacts from the box and then started to ease the black glove off of his left hand.

When the glove finally came off, Lena tried to avert her eyes, but found it was impossible to completely look away. Her father's hand at first glance looked like it was covered with old, poorly healed third-degree burns as if it had at one time been held in a deep-fat fryer for several minutes. But even in the well-lit visiting room only a few moments of observation were sufficient to reveal the faint green glow his hand produced. No, his injury hadn't come from anything has mundane as burning oil, but had instead been another consequence of the night they had lost her mother. For after finding Lana's lifeless remains, Lex had gone berserk and had ultimately hack Metallo's heart out with an axe. Unfortunately, the artificial device had been booby-trapped and when he had triumphantly lifted his trophy it had literally exploded in his hands embedding thousands of microscopic shards of Kryptonite. Now only the special lead-impregnated gloves kept the radiation from spreading to the rest of his body or to those around him.

Lena watched her father carefully inserted a contact lens in each eye. As he sat there repeatedly blinking as his eyes adjusted, she knew the contacts were simultaneously going through their initialization sequence. The contacts were a hybrid design – part nano-machine and part living organism. They were effectively inert while in their protective packaging, which was why only contacts actively being worn had been affected by the morning's energy pulse. The saline content of the human tears activated them and once activated the biological portion of the contacts converted protein molecules found in tears into minute electrical currents to power the nano-machine components which provided the visual displays.

"Don't forget the earpieces," prompted Lena as her father started to lean back in his seat.

The earbuds were purely mechanical devices. They used the tiny pressure differentials generated by sound waves entering the ear for power. This power tap attenuated the sound level actually reaching the ear drum by a mere twenty percent which with the nonlinear nature of human hearing was barely perceptible to most people. Besides handling the audio for the system, both sending and receiving, the earbuds also contained the necessary transmitters and receivers for connecting into the all encompassing Internet 4.0 network.

"Well, father, is it working?"

"I don't know. Am I supposed to be seeing an annoying blinking orange light in the corner of my eye?"

"That is just a reminder that you haven't initialized the system to synch it to your voice yet. Every time you put in a fresh pair of contacts or earbuds you have to say the keyword phrase so it will learn your voice and only accept inputs from you and not from everyone talking within audio range."

"So what is the keyword phrase?" Lex asked.

"Well, I can't say it out loud or it will lock onto my voice rather than yours. So your keyword phrase is inscribed on the inside cover of the box," answered Lena with an evil, malicious grin on her face.

Lex picked up the box, studied the inside cover, and then a matching grin spread across his face. Throwing his daughter a quick wink, he said the engraved words out loud. "I am going to fucking destroy Superman." Within three seconds the blinking orange light faded away.

When nothing else appeared for ten seconds, Lex asked, "So what now?"

"Ask for any information you want and see what happens."

It only took a couple of seconds for Lex to come up with his first question. "Show me a detailed schematic of this prison complex."

In less than five seconds a three dimensional model of the prison appeared. It hovered six inches above the table and looked perfectly solid like he could simply reach out and touch it. When he reached his right hand out to where it would have touched the nearest miniature guard tower if it had been real, detailed information about that specific tower sprang to life – when it was built, its exact dimensions, the fields of coverage for its three searchlights, the locations of its power circuits and almost everything else he would need to know to plan a successful escape.

Lena smiled at the look of concentration on her father's face as his eyes darted about an object only someone wearing the second generation contacts could see. Working on escape plans would help keep him occupied for the next few weeks.

"If you phrase your requests properly, you should also be able to get live data from all of the surveillance cameras, too, if you want," stated Lena. "But the system is capable of much more."

Lex looked up from the model prison to his daughter. He had the feeling she was about to divulge the real reason she wanted him to have these new toys. "So what else can it do?"

"Oh, lots of things. If you are bored, you can use it to alter how people appear to you. Why don't you tell it to give me blue skin, for example."

"Give Lena blue skin," Lex dutifully echoed. As the exposed portions of her hands and face appeared to turn a vivid blue, he continued, "That seems like an odd way to suggest using the device. What is the real purpose of those keywords?"

"Ahh, you know me too well," Lena answered. "I thought this next part would make a pleasant surprise. Even if you know something is coming, I think you will still find it pleasant."

Just then Lex heard a knock at the door through which his daughter had entered. At first he assumed it meant the time for Lena's visit was up. But when the door didn't open and she made no move to respond, he asked, "Who's at the door?"

Lena smiled. "A visitor for you. Hmm, here, let me get it for you." She got up, walked to the door, and pulled it open while carefully stepping to the side.

Lex watched as the door to the hallway slowly opened. A woman's silhouette filled the doorway, but before her face fully registered, his eyes were drawn passed her. For the hallway which should have been visible had been replaced by a view of his beloved castle back in Smallville as seen from just inside the front gate. And the image he saw looked perfectly real.

Then when the woman took a first tentative step into the room his eyes were drawn to her face. And tough Lex Luthor, who had tried to kill millions of people by hijacking two nuclear missiles, nearly fainted in shock. Walking into the room was his long dead wife, Lana. And whatever technology the contact lens system used, she didn't look like a simulated image on a TV screen or a computer monitor, but rather she looked like the living, vibrant woman he had married.

Lex knew it had to be a fake, but that didn't stop him from jumping up from his chair and striding briskly across the room to greet her. And getting closer did nothing to destroy the illusion. No, they paused with barely two feet separating them and still she looked real. Only when he reached out to touch her and his hand came up empty did his suddenly new reality waver.

He was just starting to turn towards Lena to ask her how this was possible and why she had chosen to do it, when he was stopped by Lana's voice. And hearing her voice made it all seem real again.

"Lex, thank god, I am so glad I finally found you."

Her voice in those few words seemed to express a combination of joy and weariness. And this sense of emotions about her only seemed to heighten the reality of the situation.

"Lana is that really you?" Lex couldn't stop himself from asking.

"Yes, Lex, it is really me. Or at least what is left of me," she answered with a rueful shake of her head. Lana's hand reached up to touch his face, but just like with his hand earlier, her hand simply passed through his face without making contact. With a forlorn expression on her face, she let her hand drop back to her side.

"What happened? How is this possible?" Lex asked, unable to keep a glimmer of hope out of his voice. Could this possibly be real, he couldn't stop asking himself.

"I am afraid my memories are pretty jumbled," she began. "No, it would be better to say most of my memories are simply gone. All I remember from the end of my 'real' life was that the man behind Metallo, a Professor Vale, uploaded my mind to a special prototype computer system shortly before my body was destroyed. I spent the next few years mostly drifting in a strange dream-like state. It was only recently the synths hacked a path into that supposedly segregated computer system and freed me. And then after learning of my unique status, they helped me reach Lena."

"The synths?" parroted back Lex, as the wheels in his long medicated brain seemed to grind slowly forward.

"The inhabitants of the 'net," she answered. "There are millions and millions of them. Surely you must know about them."

At the continuing perplexed expression on Lex's face, Lana's image turned towards Lena. "Lena, perhaps you could explain since you are the primary reason they exist."

The previous generation of the contact lens had been configured so the wearer could only see their personal avatar and not everyone else's, primarily for privacy reasons. But Lena had decided as her own little social engineering experiment to change all that. Therefore the newest, latest generation of contacts in combination with a new software upgrade about to hit the street would by default make all avatars within visual range visible all the time to every wearer. Lena had planned to roll them out slowly over a period of weeks as existing stocks in people's homes were used up and they began to use their home nano-assemblers to fabricate more. But a simultaneous adoption by everyone would have the maximum effect. And that idiot Superman and his energy wave had just handed her a perfect opportunity. She already had her PR people saturating all of the news lines with information that the next generation of contacts was ready for download from StarLabs, one of LuthorCorp's many operations without visible ties to the parent company. The spin being used to market this new version was that they were more highly resistant to disruptive signals like the one experienced this very morning. Of course, they were in no way more resistant, but Lena had judged it unlikely that Superman would allow a second energy wave to be loosed on the world. So the risk an exaggeration in this area would be uncovered seemed slim.

Therefore at the speed at which news, fads, and information propagated across the network these days, by the next morning, most people might discover the world had suddenly become a much more crowded place than it had previously been. And America being the land it was – where entertainment and sports celebrities were king – was about to be overrun with more pseudo Brad Pitts, David Beckhams, Dakota Fannings, and the like than it could possibly imagine. And don't forget the always popular dead celebrities like James Dean, Jim Morrison, and Elvis, she thought.

Forcing down the grin brought on by thoughts of millions of Elvis's suddenly appearing to wander the streets, she brought her mind back to the present.

"Okay, Mom," Lena answered the synth-Lana, who was clearly visible in her own next generation contacts, before turning towards her father. She had said it to remain in character, to help convince her father that Lana's story was real, but even she couldn't completely shake the feeling the synth standing there was really her Mother; the simulation was that good. Of course, a large part of that was because the synth really believed she was Lana.

"Father, it all began a little over a year ago," Lena started when Lex interrupted her.

"Ah, before you begin, how do I turn off your blue skin? It is very distracting."

"Sorry, just say it, but more as a command rather than as a question."

Once he had Lena's appearance straighten out, Lex resumed his seat as he gestured for his daughter to continue. He noticed that Lana had followed him across the room and now appeared to be leaning with one hip against the edge of the table. Her attention seemed to dance back and forth looking with love towards Lex and with pride towards her daughter.

"So, as I was saying, it all started a little over a year ago. At Midvale, if you want to jump to high school a year early, one of the requirements is a special science project. My roommate Linda, I am sure I have mentioned her before, did a project demonstrating how it is possible for Superman to fly. Sometimes it is hard to believe we are best friends. I mean even though he had been gone for years, he is all she seems to talk about while I want nothing more than to destroy him for what he let happen to mother. Anyway, Linda built a device which used electromagnetic fields to lift a person wearing a special wire-mesh suit. Of course, being the Superman freak she is, she made herself a costume that was a knock-off of his to wear over the top of the wire mesh one during her little flying demonstration. And I will admit she looked pretty good in the blue unitard with a big red 'S' on her chest and a matching little red cape.

"Oops, sorry I got a little sidetracked. Personally, I have always been more interested in software than hardware because a single individual can have a much bigger impact in that field. Well, that is no longer strictly true with the advent of the home nano-assemblers, now it is possible for a single creative person to have an almost instant worldwide impact on the hardware side, too. But anyway, when I was looking for a project I decided to focus more along the software side.

"Like everyone else, I used a personal avatar for helping with on-line research, keeping track of my schedule, filtering my e-mail and calls, and, of course, being the special friend and confidant. Unfortunately, they quickly got old as they started recycling the same old canned responses which attempted to pass for personalities.

"So, I decided to see if I could improve things and make the avatars behave in a more realistic manner. Long story, short – it took me three months to find the key for which scientists have been searching for at least thirty years. And the best part was that once I had the basic algorithm working, I could allow the synths themselves to perform most of the work of programming and also accumulating the data they needed to develop emotions and personalities out in the wilds of the 'net."

As she paused a moment to catch her breath, Lena glanced at the Lana synth, who had been developed in the much the same way. She had provided the basic compulsion that the synth was indeed Lana, but with the backstory that she was suffering from a variation of amnesia. Then she had merely given the synth a few hints of how to find out about her past on the 'net and sent her out in search of herself. And look at her now, Lena thought. She has the looks, the voice, and the mannerisms all down to a tee. At the moment she was dressed in the casual jeans and white tee shirt her Mom had always favored and Lena could even see the old faded white scar on her right upper arm where it extended below the shirt sleeve down almost to her elbow. For a moment Lena wondered if the synth now displayed all of her mother's other scars. She remembered when she had been a young child and had first noticed the surprising collection of scars her mother possessed on her legs, torso, and upper arms. At first she had been both curious and a little scared by the scars particularly after one bath time when she managed to count thirty-two distinct scars on her Mother's body, but eventually the curiosity had won out. When she had gotten the courage to ask her mother about them, Lana had responded that they were from a time before she had gotten together with her father and the details would have to wait until Lena was older. Since she was a lot older, Lena briefly wondered if she asked about them now if she would get the true story. Then once more she had to reminder herself that this was just a synth and not her real mother. Damn, it sure felt real.

For a couple of seconds Lena pondered the potential for a whole new business opportunity of bringing back people who had died within the past tens years for whom there was enough info scattered on the 'net to form the basis necessary to recreate the underlying personality. Of course, not everyone's life was as well documented in video and news footage as the wife of Lex Luthor.

"I knew it would take a bit of trial and error to work out all the details, so rather than just test one avatar at a time, I hacked the system of the biggest avatar provider, GenesisCorp, and dumped my software into all of their avatars. It only took a few hours of monitoring and fine tuning the results before the first of the synths made the jump to self-awareness. The first one was somewhere down in Florida, but within minutes it propagated to all GenesisCorp avatars on the 'net. Now to protect the synths until they were adequately entrenched in all the systems, I instilled in them the need to be extremely cautious about revealing themselves. Therefore most people aren't even aware of what has happened. They just think the avatars have gotten a modest software upgrade which has improved their apparent personality skills."

"So let me get this straight," interjected her father. "You have created millions of self-aware artificial intelligences and set them loose on the internet?"

"Well, I would say it was more of a case of giving them the first little shove and then allowing them the opportunity to go the rest of the way on their own."

"Back door?" Lex asked.

Lena stared back at her father with a wicked little grin that only a Luthor could truly master. "Now what do you think? Would I create a force of this magnitude without a way to stop them if they headed in a direction I didn't like or without a way to more directly use them if it was beneficial in destroying Superman?"

Lex was nodding in approval when Lana abruptly spoke up.

"Lena, what is all this talk about destroying Superman? He is a force of good in the world. You should be figuring out how to help him, not stop him."

Lena stared at the Lana-synth and was for the moment at a loss at how to respond. First of all she wasn't sure why the synth was taking Superman's side – she certainly hadn't programmed that trait into it. Obviously, it had developed that perspective from its research into Lana's past. And with its access to zettabytes of on-line data, who knew what all it had found.

Second of all, she could hardly use her real motivation, that Superman had caused her mother's death, when the supposedly 'real' Lana was standing right in front of her. No, if she used that approach it would be the same as admitting this Lana was a fake and that wouldn't do with her long-term plans for the Lana synth as well as all the other synths.

Lena rose to her feet and walked around the table to stand next to the synth while buying a few extra seconds to think. She was almost startled at how she seemed to tower over the likeness of her Mother, who was surprisingly petite. For just an instant she flashed back to when she had been six and had looked up at her 'real' mother for the last time. She felt lucky to have at least those vague memories since she knew her Mother's parents had been killed in the famous meteor shower when her Mom had been only three. Was there a curse on her mother's side of the family which resulted in the parents dying young and leaving the children to grow up as orphans? Okay, technically her father hadn't died when she was young, but since he had been incarcerated almost continuously since she had been six, it was almost the same.

"Mom," she finally began. "We thought you were dead for almost seven years and it was definitely Superman's fault. I'm sorry if I can't instantly forgive him now that you are back. And while it is wonderful to have you here again, it doesn't make up for all the time we lost or my being stuck in a boarding school away from my family. With father still in this prison and with your, well . . . ah . . . non-corporeal state, I am not going to be escaping the Midvale School for Girls any time soon. So, you see, I still have a lot of reasons to hate Superman, not to mention what happened to father's hands."

Synth-Lana turned her attention from the daughter she had just started to get to know again over the last few days and looked at her husband. She had felt almost intoxicated with joy when she had walked through the door and had seen him in the flesh for the first time after years and years of only being able to dream about him. He had a few more lines around the eyes then she had remembered or at least compared to the old photos and videos she had found on the 'net which now had to pass for memories. But she hadn't noticed the gloves he now wore nor had she seen any mention of them when she had been searching for her past. Whatever had happened to his hands had been kept very quiet.

Still she knew in her heart that Superman, or rather Clark couldn't have been the cause, at least not intentionally. No, Clark had loved her once and maybe still did and he would never have done anything that would hurt her. She even knew he would have gone out of his way to protect Lex simply to ensure her happiness.

She had searched the 'net far and wide looking for information about her lost past to use in place of true memories. Old school records, newspaper archives, television station historical databases, and even old on-line blogs had provided tantalizing tidbits, but it had been the data vaults at LuthorCorp which had been the true treasure trove. Hundreds of security cameras had been in operation throughout the castle during her seven years of residence. Almost ten million hours of video were on file, of which only the tiniest fraction had ever been reviewed in detail by human eyes. But with her now computer-based mind, she had reviewed the entire record over the past three days. She had happily watched hour after hour of footage of the times she and Lex had spent playing with a much younger Lena. And she listened in on many conversations where she and Lex had planned their future together.

But she had come across many other interesting conversations, too. And one of them had been on the very day of her marriage to Lex, less than an hour before the start of the ceremony. She had already been dressed in her white satin wedding gown when she had had a conversation with Clark in the castle's library. This particular recording had been damaged somewhere along the way with the audio track completely wiped out and only the video remaining. Sensing something important might have been said and that the audio appeared to have been intentionally eliminated, she had immediately searched the 'net until she acquired the necessary lip-reading skills.

And in the recording she quickly learned why it had been tampered with, Clark had revealed his long hidden secret in a last attempt to stop her from making what he thought was a bad decision. Lana had already found records indicating she and Clark had previously dated, including photos of them dancing at their high school prom, but she had had no recollection that Clark had a big secret. She had watched as the emotions had rolled across her face in the recording and it had felt like she was watching a stranger. She had wondered for the millionth time why so many of her most important memories had been lost, as she saw shock, amazement, anger, sympathy, and finally acceptance roll in waves across her face in the next sixty seconds. In the end the earlier version of her on the video had told Clark she would always protect his secret, but her destiny was now with Lex.

And apparently, she had always protected Clark's secret, she realized, as she turned her attention back to her husband and daughter. Obviously neither of them knew Clark was Superman, yet as soon as she had seen the recording where Clark had described some of his abilities, she had known they almost exactly fit Superman. What was amazing was that they had never made the connection based on simply how much resemblance Clark and Superman shared. Oh, they didn't look exactly alike, as in some way Clark was able to change his appearance slightly when he was 'in costume' and it was more than simply the different hairstyle. No, it was almost as though he could use the muscles in his face to change the shape of his cheekbones. Or maybe it was simply a case of Clark's face maturing during the six years between the wedding and the first appearance of Superman. From the surveillance footage at the castle and around the LuthorCorp headquarters in Metropolis, she knew Clark had drifted away from her and Lex over those years until almost all contact was lost. And since Clark hadn't been around much during those years and then having been gone for the past five, it wasn't surprising Lena hadn't made the connection, she might not even remember Clark's name.

Still, Lana thought if she had never divulged Clark's secrets during all those years, she must have had a good reason; even if she could no longer remembered it. So, she didn't feel it was right to say anything now without first talking to Clark. And from the rumblings passing through the synths on the 'net, she was certain they could help her track him down.

Though her ruminations seemed to have touched on many topics and had taken her thoughts to many times and places, less than a second had actually passed since her daughter had finished speaking.

After giving one last glance at Lex's gloved hands, Lana turned back to her daughter. "Lena, in the short time I have been back I have seen the incredible potential you possess – a potential to really make a difference in the world. Please don't squander it on something as petty as revenge. I don't want to wake up someday and find you sitting behind bars like your father. I have accessed the records and understand why he is here. I am just one person and even if Superman was responsible for what happened to me, and I am not saying he was, it still didn't justify attempting to kill millions of people to get even.

"Now," she continued while forcing herself to stand a little straighter. "I think you need to give me some time alone with your father. We have some catching up to do and I want to see what I can do to start the healing process. I hate seeing him in here and I hate seeing you trapped in a school where you don't want to be. So the sooner I can get Lex's head straight, the sooner we can become a family again."

Lena stared at the synth version of her mother while listening to the almost steel edge which had crept into her voice. She remembered her real mother being tough when she needed to be, but never quite űber-Lana like this. But then Lena had very little knowledge or understanding of her mother's involvement with the meteor freak wars that overtook and nearly destroyed Smallville during the years before Lana had retreated into the role of wife and mother. However synth-Lana in her search for her past had uncovered irrefutable evidence of the activities of the Chloe-Clark-Lana triumvirate to protect the town including at least hints to most of the seventeen times she had been forced to kill to save herself and the ones she loved from the freaks and monsters the meteors had unleashed. And synth-Lana had also uncovered video footage from the countless times the conflicts had left her or Chloe battling for their lives in the Smallville Emergency Center. And with hundreds of hours of recordings spread over almost five years, she had watched and absorbed how her former self had grown stronger and tougher with each ensuing passage through the forge of the Smallville shadow wars.

Therefore Lena surprised herself with a meek, "Yes, mother," response as she rose and moved towards the door, no longer quite certain bringing back her mother had been such a good idea.

- + - + - + - + - + - +

Superman touched down in the Fortress exactly ten minutes before the agreed upon five hour interval would end. He felt his time had been used reasonably productively. He had saved one hundred eighteen people for certain death from a variety of accidents and mishaps, some directly related to the energy pulse he had inadvertently released and some not. He had talked with the AI Carrie, but she hadn't found any leads on Chloe. He had also explained to her about the need for a two-way communication link between the Fortress and the outside world. Here she had been able to help and he had been amazed that between the technical data available on the net and the now readily available nano-assembler machines, the AIs managed to design and construct a new communication satellite in under thirty minutes. Therefore as a last act before returning to the Fortress he had lifted the new satellite up to geosynchronous orbit.

Now all he had to do was use the nano-assembler he had brought back to fabricate the new communication station for the Fortress and then he could turn his attention to Lyla and his mother.

It only took him eight minutes to fab, set up, and check out the new equipment. He was just completing a test call to Carrie when the warning alarm chimed indicating the outer door to Kandor's bottle was about to open. Hurriedly he switched the communication gear to standby and moved over to monitor the crystalline chamber Brainiac had created to perform the nearly magical reductions and enlargements.

Almost as soon as he reached it, he could feel the power begin to cycle up within the device. And now that he was listening for it, he could hear the crystals making up the Fortress begin to strain in harmonic sympathy. He hoped Lyla was right about this single usage not causing another one of the devastating energy pulses.

Brainiac's chamber began to give off a faint red glow, not unlike the glow which had permeated the Fortress when he had stripped Zod and his cohorts of their Kryptonian abilities. Then shadows began to visibly glow within the confines of chamber, tiny at first, but quickly growing until they were life-sized. In less than thirty seconds the red glow began to diminish and Superman could feel the power levels begin to drop. And he could also hear the ringing in the Fortress' structure begin to quickly dampen down. It seemed that Lyla was correct about this use not triggering the run away cascade in the crystals of the Fortress.

Moving around to the chamber's entrance, he could see Lyla and his mother already making their way through the labyrinth which prevented the miniaturization/enlargement rays from leaking out and contaminating nearby objects or people.

"Mom, are you okay?" Clark asked as he pulled his mother into a hug. Suddenly it felt like it had been days since he had last seen her rather than just a few hours.

"Yes, I'm fine," she replied as she held the hug a little longer than was absolutely necessary, but she didn't feel particularly guilty since she still had five years worth of missing hugs to catch up on.

When she finally broke the hug, she stepped back and dropped her hands to her hips where they came to rest on the flying belt she was still wearing. Once Clark and Lyla had exchanged a quick kiss, Martha asked. "Clark, will the flying belts work out here, too?"

Clark glanced down at the belt she was wearing and noticed Lyla still had one on too even though she would no longer need it. "I would think so, however I never tried it. Go ahead and give it a try, if anything goes wrong, I am here to catch you."

Martha nodded and let her fingers drop lightly to the controls. With nearly four hours of practice under her belt between the initial descent to the city of Kandor with Clark and the return journey with Lyla, she was getting to be confident with the controls. For the first handful of seconds she hovered just a few inches above the floor in case something went wrong. But then she quickly climbed up towards the high ceiling of the chamber and did a couple lazy loops around the perimeter of the room before dropping to a soft landing next to Clark.

"You are getting pretty good with that belt, Mom," Clark stated as he pulled her in close and placed one arm across her shoulders.

Martha felt a hint of a blush spread across her cheeks. "It is kind of fun to be able to fly free as a bird. It brings back memories of daydreams I had as a little girl, dreams that came back the first time I saw you fly. It is wonderful to get a small taste of what it must feel like to have your incredible gifts." Then her face sobered as she continued. "I almost wish I could take it home with me."

Clark nodded as he thought back to the conversation he had shared with Carrie while they had waited for the nano-assembler to complete the fabrication of the communication satellite. Carrie had explained how the nano-assemblers had a 'replication mode' just like something out of the old Star Trek TV show where the device could duplicate any object it had molecularly scanned, as long as it had sufficient quantities of the required raw ingredients. He couldn't help but wonder if it could replicate a Kryptonian device like the flying belt. He didn't know if all the elements on Krypton had sufficiently close analogs here on Earth, but it seemed worth a try.

"Why don't you take it with you if you want, Mom. There are plenty of others back in Kandor. And if that doesn't turn out to be sufficient, well, we'll figure out a way to make more."

As his mother gave an appreciative nod, Clark turned to Lyla. "How's the progress on stopping the Fortress from generating the energy pulses?"

"Pretty good. Some additional ideas occurred to me after I last talked to you, so I brought along a little more equipment than I had originally envisioned. It is still back in the enlargement chamber. Want to help me move it out here nearer to the control panel while we talk?"

Lyla and Clark moved back into the enlargement chamber and Lyla took a moment to stare at the large pile of equipment. Then as she stooped to pickup one of the larger components, she got her first taste of what her body could do now that it was no longer under the artificial red sunlight of Kandor. This particular box weighed almost fifty percent more than she did and back on Kandor she could barely budge it without resorting to one of the anti-gravity belts. But now suddenly the box felt as light as a feather.

It took only a few minutes to relocate to a spot adjacent to the control podium the pile of boxes she had towed up to the exit from Kandor via a string of anti-gravity belts. They were just in the process of uncrating the delicate equipment when the newly erected communication station started beeping with the tone which indicated an incoming call.

Since the only one in the outside world who knew how to reach this particular comm-station was the AI Carrie, Clark quickly walked over and hit the control to activate the vision screen. Hopefully, she had some good news, but with the way his day had been going, some new emergency seemed more likely.

As the image began to form Clark briefly glanced over his shoulder to see his Mother step up behind him while Lyla continued to work on setting up her equipment. When he turned back to the screen he was surprised to find the image slowly coming into focus was not the blonde headed girl he was expecting, but rather a brunette. As the image solidified, he heard a sharp gasp from Martha at the same instant he also recognized the completely impossible face of Lana Lang.

"Lana?" Clark asked at barely more than a whisper as he wondered what was going on. It may have been seven long years in reality since he had last seen her, but the memory of holding her lifeless body in his arms was as clear as if it had happened yesterday. And it had been less than twelve hours earlier that he had been in the cemetery with his mother and he had seen the headstone marking the spot where they had laid her body to rest. But now she was suddenly here and she looked exactly the same, as though she hadn't aged a day.

"Yes, Clark, it really is me," she answered. Then she turned slightly and raised the right sleeve of her tee shirt exposing the ugly scar that ran up the outside of her arm before disappearing across her shoulder blade beneath the bunched sleeve. Finally, she looked straight at Clark and uttered a cryptic, "Go, Crows, Go . . . Rah . . . Rah."

Clark couldn't suppress the small smile which briefly curled his lips even as his eyes were drawn to the permanent horrible reminder of the time in high school when he had almost lost both Lana and Chloe. The smile was for their old secret code phrase; something he hadn't thought about in years.

In the deepest, darkest days of their battles against meteor freaks, phantom zoners, 33.1 experiments gone awry, and your everyday garden variety mad scientist bent on dominating Smallville, then Metropolis, and finally the rest of the world, Chloe and Lana had developed the two part system of identifying they were really who they said they were. The showing of their scars verified they weren't clones, doppelgangers, shapeshifters, or evil robot duplicates. The code phrase proved their minds hadn't been taken over by body snatchers, mind swappers, or telepathic control devices. Oh, the system had still let them down a few times, but considering the vast number of times the girls hadn't been who they seemed to be, mostly it had worked.

Just for a second Clark's grin got even bigger as he remembered the time when the cloning machine of Doctor Dabney Donovan of Cadmus Labs had run amok. As a result Smallville had been invaded by a four hundred strong army of Chloe clones all descending on The Talon and demanding Espresso Frappuccino by the bucketful.

But then watching Lana roll her sleeve back down Clark sobered. "Lana, where are you? How is this possible? You . . . died . . . seven years ago."

Lana sighed; this was turning into a day of explanations. She should be getting it down pat by now.

"Right before I 'died' Professor Vale uploaded my mind into a prototype computer he had built. I have been trapped in there ever since. The synths only recently broke through its firewalls which allowed me to escape."

Clark stared at her image for a moment taking in what she had just said. She had lost her body and now existed on the net, not unlike Carrie the AI and all the others of her ilk. However she did know both parts of the old secret recognition system, even if the scar was no more real than her body.

Finally, Clark nodded. "It is good to see you, even if it is only as an image on the screen. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes, I don't want to spend the rest of eternity as a bodiless entity drifting around in the 'net. Lex needs me back in the real world, if he is ever to be rehabilitated and Lena could really benefit from having her mom back, too. And I want to be able to be her mom again. The last time I saw her she was just a young child, but now she is becoming a young woman and I remember how hard it was going through those times without my mother."

Clark's mind raced as he tried to come up with some way of giving Lana a body. Immediately his mind returned to the army of Chloe clones. Donovan's equipment had been destroyed, but possibly he could resurrect it. The big question was where could he find a sample of Lana's DNA?

Lana appeared to read his mind, or perhaps it was just that she still knew him well even after all of the years they had been separated. "Clark, I am not here seeking your help in getting me a new body, at least not today. The synths have some ideas they are pursuing to help me. And frankly, some of them want bodies, too, so they can migrate into the 'real' world on either a full or part-time basis.

"No, the main reason I am here is Chloe. I think I have located her. Well, okay, I haven't actually located her, but I have narrowed it down to the three most probable locations where she could be detained."

Clark blinked at this sudden shift in the conversation. "I just talked to Carrie – ah, Jimmy Olsen's former avatar. She didn't have any idea where Chloe is."

Lana shrugged. "I have talked to Carrie, that's how I found out how to contact you. As far as finding Chloe, well let's just say I have a much stronger motivation in finding my best friend than the synths do. And regardless of all of their instantaneous access to information, they still have only been conscious for a few months and don't understand human nature the way a human, or former human does."

"Where is she?" Clark asked feeling a surge of adrenaline rush into his body.

"The most probable location I came up with is in Central China in a restricted military district just west of the small town of Zhaomianhe in the foothills of the Daba Shan Mountains. Zhaomianhe is located twenty miles up the Meiping River from where it feeds into Yangtze River at Letianxi just below the Three Gorges Dam."

At this point Lana's image on the screen was replaced by a satellite view of China that then zoomed into great coastal city of Shanghai before seeming to follow the Yangtze River inland at treetop level with an apparent speed of hundreds of miles an hour. As part of Superman's brain focused on memorizing the offered landmarks, another portion continued to listen to Lana's voice.

"There are a lot of restricted military districts scattered around China many of which contain either political prisoners or prisoners from the war in Taiwan. The synths helped me use the available satellite imagery for the past five years to study military traffic patterns and new construction in remote, out-of-the-way locations. After identifying high probability targets based on significant changes in their usual patterns during the past twelve months, we penetrated their supposedly cordoned off military computer network and tapped into their security camera systems. Only at three sites did I see any significant numbers of prisoners with occidental features. And by far the largest concentration of women with blonde hair is at the camp west of Zhaomianhe."

By the time Lana's voice paused, the video flyover had reached the target area. Well, not the actual target, as it paused for a final few seconds on a view of the Yangtze River where the other smaller river joined it and overlaid was a flashing red arrow pointing up the smaller river with the words '20 miles north'. Slowly the image of the Yangtze dissolved and was replaced by suddenly grinning Lana.

"So, Clark, do you still remember our first trip to China?"

Clark nodded. How could he forget? It had been his first big adventure traveling further than Metropolis, well, other than a couple quick runs to New York to see Doctor Swann. It had been completely weird and a little scary to be so far from home and barely able to communicate. And of course there had been the whole possessed, superpowered Lana thing. Sometimes it seemed like in the good old days before she had married Lex that Lana had had superpowers via one means or another almost as much of the time as he did. Unfortunately, it rarely seemed to bestow her with super-healing abilities like his, as the plethora of scars marring her body demonstrated.

"Sure," Clark responded. "I particularly remember the look on your face when you found out what we were eating that first night in Canton."

For a moment Lana stared blankly at him.

"You know," he prompted. "When you found out the meat dish was monkey and you then made the comment about 'at least it wasn't monkey brains' like in the second Indiana Jones movie."

Lana slowly shook her head. "Sorry, Clark. When Vale uploaded my mind into his computer, I lost a few details here and there. I guess that dinner is one of them."

Clark frowned a little at this confession as it suddenly seemed somehow more significant the Lana was letting on, but then his train of thought was broken when Lyla walked up. Casually she slipped in beside Clark and draped her arm around his waist.

Clark turned and smiled at her for a moment before returning his attention to Lana. "Lana, I would like to introduce you to someone. This is my girlfriend Lyla. She is from Krypton like me."

As Clark watched, Lana's eyes seemed to sharpen as she gave Lyla the once over and an expression briefly showed on her face that he would have at one time labeled as jealousy. But quickly her face smoothed and then she smiled.

With a slight nod of her head, Lana answered. "Lyla, it is good to meet you."

"Same here," responded Lyla. "Kal, ahh, Clark has told me a lot about you and your lives in Smallville during your school years, but I will admit I never expected the opportunity to actually meet you." Dropping to a stage whisper, she added. "You will have to tell me all about him when he was younger."

Lana grinned. "I would enjoy a little girl talk sometime."

Clark broke in before the tone got too light. "Lyla, how would you like to explore the abilities you will have here on earth with a little trip to China?"

"China?" she frowned briefly as she tried to remember some of the history of his adopted planet he had shared during the long voyage back to Earth. "Is that where they have . . . ah . . . elephants?"

Clark grinned. "No, that's Africa or India. I am afraid no elephants in China." Then his face turned more serious. "And I am afraid this particular trip may expose you to some of the dark side of human nature. My old friend Chloe may be being held prisoner in China and I need to find out for sure. And if she is, I need to bring her home."

Lyla's own smile wavered. "I am ready to help; looking out for friends is always important. I think we can postpone solving the energy wave problem until later."

Clark nodded and turned back to Lana. "I need to drop my Mom back in Smallville, but then we will head straight over to China and look for Chloe."

"Good," she replied. "I will feel better when I know she is safe or at least know her status. If she isn't at that location, you can contact me for the other probable locations. Just pick up any phone and say, 'Call Lana Luthor' and you will be routed through to me."

Clark couldn't stop the brief grimace that passed through his body at how easily she referred to herself as 'Lana Luthor'. There had been a time when she had been at the center of his thoughts and his heart. They had even been together briefly as man and woman when the ghost of Jor El had stripped him of his powers. But now she was with insane homicidal Lex and she didn't appear to have any intention of changing that status.

"Okay, Lana. And it has been good seeing you are still alive. Hopefully, Chloe will be, too."

Lana raised her hand as though to give a small wave before lowering it again. "It was good to see you again, too. And it was nice to meet you, Lyla. Martha, how about calling me when you get home? I would like to hear what has been going on in Smallville while I was away."

Clark saw his Mother, who was standing on his other side, give a small nod just as the image of Lana faded from the display.

"Well, that was certainly an unexpected surprise," his Mother commented as he glanced over and watched her wipe a tear away from the corner of her eye. "Getting you and Lana back in the same day, I don't know how this day can get any better."

Clark pulled his mother into a one armed hug. "It will get still better if I can find Chloe."

He stood there in silence for a moment with an arm around each of the two most important women in his life: Lyla and his Mom. But after enjoying the simple life in Kandor for the past two years with just Lyla, suddenly everything seemed so much more complicated. Seeing Lois for the first time in five years. Finding out Lana wasn't truly dead. Hopefully, locating and rescuing Chloe in the next few hours. He still had strong feelings for all these other women who had played big parts in his previous existence on Earth.

Life definitely was about to become more interesting.

End of Chapter 5.

Duane


End file.
